![]() Sharing the same underground cavern as LHCb is a smaller instrument called MoEDAL, which stands for Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC. These are then fired into an artificial atmosphere, where their effects can be studied much more closely. This isn’t an easy process to study in the real atmosphere, with real cosmic rays, so CERN is using the accelerator to create its own cosmic rays. It’s been theorized that cosmic rays play a role in cloud formation by seeding tiny water droplets around the Earth. The climate experiment is called CLOUD, which stands for "Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets". One of the project scientists inside the CLOUD experiment chamber. This is a smaller and less sophisticated accelerator than the LHC, but it’s still capable of doing useful work. One experiment at CERN’s Proton Synchrotron is linking particle physics to climate science. Studying CP violation in particles containing beauty is one of the most promising ways to shed light on the emergence of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the early universe, according to CERN.Īway from the LHC, there are other facilities at CERN that are conducting important research. This asymmetry has been given the technical name CP violation, and studying it is one of the main aims of the Large Hadron Collider’s LHCb experiment.Īll hadrons are made up of quarks, but LHCb is designed to detect particles that include a particularly rare type of quark known as beauty. Yet very early on, probably within the first second of the universe's existence, virtually all the antimatter had disappeared, and only the normal matter we see today remained. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe must have started out with equal amounts of both. One of the key mysteries of the universe is why it seemingly contains so much more matter than antimatter. (Image credit: Ronald Patrick/Stringer/Getty Images) CERN's experiments The probability of large extra dimensions is still considered slim, and it is not clear whether a black Saturn would actually stabilise before evaporating.īut there is an outside chance that in a few years in a tunnel near Geneva, physicists will make a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut.The Large Hadron Collider is currently shut down for maintenance, which has created an opportunity to offer access to the public. Of course there are a lot of “ifs” attached. Elvang’s hole-and-ring combinations would do the same, but probably with a distinctive pattern. Smaller ones evaporate faster, and any made in the LHC would last a tiny fraction of a split-second, producing a burst of all kinds of subatomic particles. Physicist Stephen Hawking worked out in the 1970s that black holes evaporate, shedding their gravitational energy as so-called Hawking radiation. If so, the detectors at the LHC will light up. Because there are so many ways to make a black Saturn, with different sizes of ring and different spins, they might even be produced in greater numbers than ‘ordinary’ black holes. If extra dimensions exist, black Saturns might be produced in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in Geneva, due to open at the end of 2007. The spinning ring would also drag space-time around with it, making the central black hole spin as well.Ī few thousand times the mass-energy of a proton would be enough – producing a black hole no more than about 10 -19 metres across. The ring could be thin like a rubber band or fat like a doughnut, and the rotation would flatten it – “like a doughnut that you have squashed,” says Elvang. Just like the central black hole, the ring would be defined by its event horizon, a boundary beyond which nothing can escape the object’s gravity. It’s essential that it rotates to keep balanced,” Elvang told New Scientist. “If you just had a ring, it would collapse. According to a new theory, any black hole that pops out of the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland might be surrounded by a black ring – forming a microscopic “black Saturn”.Ī black hole and a black ring can co-exist, in theory, as long as they are set spinning, say Henriette Elvang of MIT in Cambridge, US, and Pau Figueras of the University of Barcelona in Spain. If we ever make black holes on Earth, they might be much stranger objects than the star-swallowing monsters known to exist in space. (Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) If space has relatively large extra dimensions, ringed black holes, or ‘black Saturns’, could exist
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