Part of the Linac 4 booster at CERN, as seen on May 9 in Meyrin, near Geneva. The booster will allow the LHC to reach higher luminosity in the next few years. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
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Large Hadron Collider
This stone marten knocked out power to the $7 billion Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in November 2016 when it touched a 18,000-volt transformer. Natural History Museum Rotterdam hide caption
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft returned images, such as this one, to improve maps of different regions of Pluto. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI hide caption
This July 16, 1945, photo shows the mushroom cloud of the first atomic explosion at Trinity Test Site, New Mexico. AP hide caption
Smart phones contain a silicon chip inside the camera that might be used to detect rare, high energy particles from outer space. J. Yang/Courtesy of WIPAC hide caption
Part of the Large Hadron Collider. iStockphoto hide caption
A view of the Large Hadron Collider in its tunnel at CERN in Switzerland. Martial Trezzini/AP hide caption
The Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector under construction in 2005. ATLAS is one of the tools physicists are using to try and understand how the universe works. Maximilien Brice/CERN hide caption
High-energy physics in action: an image of an event in CERN's CMS detector during the search for the Higgs boson. CERN hide caption
A visualization of proton-proton collision events recorded by the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Big science in orbit: the Hubble Space Telescope NASA hide caption
One way we make sense of the cosmos is to study what's in it, objects like this brown dwarf (artist's impression) observed by the ESO's ALMA project. Another way is to watch what happens when tiny particles are smashed together in "labs" such as the LHC at CERN. M. Kornmesser/ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO hide caption
The Universe of Particles exhibition at CERN in 2011. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
The Large Hadron Collider. CMS Collaboration/dapd via AP hide caption
A view of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. For scale, note the workers toward the bottom of the image. Maximilien Brice/CERN hide caption