Scientists in Geneva excited about expected discoveries about the Universe

After several setbacks over the past two years,  the 27km long particle accelerator ring-shaped tunnel, 100m below Geneva, was fired up last week to start the hunt for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions, the origin of mass, and the presence of abundant dark matter in the universe.

It's superconducting magnets  accelerate particles. Two beams of particles called hadrons  are sent hurtling around the ring in opposite directions, close to the speed of light at very high energies, and are encouraged to collide. Large Hadron Collider LHC

"This is the moment we have been waiting and preparing for", said a spokesperson  "We're very much looking forward to the results from proton collisions to give us new insights into the evolution of matter in the early Universe."
The high-energy collisions produced by the LHC will re-create the conditions that governed the moments just after the Big Bang. Physicists hope that the collisions will create particles, even if only for a tiny instant, that have never been observed: they are the missing links of modern physics.

There's more to the Universe than meets the eye. Observations have shown that the things we can observe -- what's on our own planet and the planets, stars and galaxies in space -- only make up 4% of the stuff that's out there! The rest doesn't emit any electromagnetic radiation -- light -- and so we can't detect it by conventional methods. We know that it exists, though, because of its effects: the celestial bodies we can observe respond to gravitational forces much greater than those accounted for by known matter, and the Universe's expansion is accelerated by some strange repulsive force.