Bonus points if you can explain why people are freaking out about CERN activating it during the eclipse specifically. I don’t understand how these can be related in any way.
In: Physics
Hadrons is a class of particles including protons and neutrons. This is what makes up the nucleolus of atoms. So the name literally means the big atom smasher and is pretty descriptive of what it does. There is a huge circular tunnel dug into the Alps. In these tunnels the LHC is built as a huge circle of supercoducting magnets. These accelerate the atoms up to extremely high speeds as they go round and around in this circle. There are a number of different experiments connected to the LHC but they all basically boil down to smashing the atoms into each other or something else and see what happens. When these high energy particles crash they have a huge amount of energy concentrated in a tiny point. And since energy is mass this energy can end up as exotic particles that we can study.
There have been some controversy around the LHC. We are doing things that does not happen naturally anywhere on Earth. However there are lots of these high energy particles in the solar system which crashes into the upper atmosphere and into other planets all the time. So researchers have never been worried about any destructive things happening. But conspiracy theorists are never happy and will just move the goal post whenever their predictions turns out to be wrong. The LHC have been operational through several solar eclipses already so there is nothing new about this one, not that solar eclipses and high energy particle research have anything to do with each other anyway.
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