This story comes with a reminder that astronomy is one of those rare fields where there are theorists, experimentalists, and observationalists. Theorists do the math, compute and figure out how things work, and hopefully make predictions that can be tested. Observationalists… well, we’re out there watching the sky to see what new secrets it has to reveal and testing those theories… and those rarely talked about experimentalists? They are trying to recreate the conditions of some of our universe’s weirdest and wildest parts in the lab and nowhere does this process get weirder or wilder than at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Spanning the border of Switzerland and France, this nearly 27-kilometer ring of vacuum pipes and accelerating magnets speeds up particles and directs them into instruments where they collide, releasing all the kinetic energy and mass energy in a tremendous burst that allows new particles to form.

In the past, the LHC has allowed us to detect the elusive Higgs boson, which allows stuff to have mass. After several years of refurbishment, the LHC is now back to work again, crashing proton beams together at higher energies than ever before while allowing more data to be measured than ever before. The search is on for particles that prove – or disprove – the standard model of particle physics or its competing theories like supersymmetry. The search also continues for particles that might form that elusive dark matter we see only from gravitational effects.

The LHC first fired back up in April, but it was only on July 5 that it was turned all the way up to see just what can be found. The initial full power firing didn’t have the proton beams cranked all the way up, yet; researchers started at a lower intensity to allow for calibrations, but so far so good.

So good in fact, that despite warning everyone that discoveries and results could take months to make, you may have seen announcements that new particles had already been found! Here, we have to disappoint you. 

The good folks at Reuters correctly noted that in a seminar yesterday, researchers highlighted particles that have been discovered in the past few years – tetraquarks and pentaquarks – and discussed a new naming scheme. That seminar was on July 5 and discussed old data, while the LHC powered up to collect new data. Science takes time, and there is a certain poetry in the results of the old data getting headlines on the day new data is being collected.

We can expect more new particles to be announced in the next few months and years. As those results come out, we’ll bring them to you here on the Daily Space.

More Information

CERN press release

Large Hadron Collider: Scientists at CERN observe three “exotic” particles for first time (Reuters via The Indian Express)

Upgraded LHC begins epic run to search for new physics (Nature)