Scientists at the world's largest
particle accelerator have successfully collided
beams of protons at the highest energy levels ever seen.
There was cheering in the control room at CERN,
the European nuclear research center in Switzerland
as one of the biggest and most complicated
scientific experiments got fully underway.
The experiment is seen as a major breakthrough
in efforts to understand
the fundamental nature of the universe.
Doctor Martin White is a research fellow at CERN.
"One of the great mysteries
of the universe is that most of the mass
in the universe is some kind of dark matter.
It's some kind of particle
that doesn't match anything we've seen before.
And if you look into space,
you can see this
because you can see its gravitational pull.
So wonder thing is that we hope to get,
recent and earlier,
an effective scene in the next two years
of some idea of what this dark matter is."