Scientists are warming up mankind’s most noteworthy piece of equipment to date, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Just as it discovered the Higgs particle back in 2012, scientists hope it will now advance human knowledge of the universe even further by aiding in the discovery of dark matter particles.

 

The concept of dark matter is just recently theorized to be matter that interacts with gravity, acts on ordinary objects like gravity and adds unseen mass to the universe. Through equations analyzing the required mass of the universe to maintain the balance that exists today, scientists realized that the matter we can visibly see via light (i.e. galaxies, stars, planets, rock and dust, etc.) doesn’t add up, or even come close, to the required amount. They concluded that there must be something else out there that makes up the large rest of the required amount, but that doesn’t interact with light. The idea of dark matter was born, thought to account for 25 percent of the universe, along with the idea of dark energy, a force that opposes gravity, which makes up about 70 percent of the universe.

 

The Large Hadron Collider is gearing up for the discovery of its career as scientists have never before discovered a particle that exhibits the properties associated with dark matter. The machine will be fired up and ready to go by the end of this month, and scientists will get to work in Geneva. The LHC has been shut down for maintenance for the past two years.