Largest machine

The largest machine ever built is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The collider consists of a circular underground tunnel with a circumference of 26.6 km (16.5 miles) and was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 at an approximated cost of 4.6 billion Swiss francs (£2.9 billion; $4.4 billion).

The LHC contains 1232 large dipole magnets, each weighing 35 tons. These create a magnetic field 200,000 times stronger than Earth’s that deflects beams of ultra-fast protons along the curvature of the tunnel. If uncoiled, its superconducting wire could wrap around the earth over 6 times.

Since it switched on in 2008, the LHC has been accelerating and smashing together quadrillions of high energy protons. When these beams collide, their enormous energy is converted into many more particles, the decay traces of which can be picked up and studied at one of the collider’s seven detectors. The LHC made history in 2012 when its ATLAS detector measured traces of the final piece of the standard model, The Higg’s Boson, 44 years after it was initially predicted to exist. The standard model describes all known forces and particles in the universe, and the existence of the Higg’s Boson explains why some of these, such as electrons and quarks, have mass.

The detector is planned to stay in operation until 2030, continuing to search for answers to some of the biggest mysteries of our universe.