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Scientists Discover 'Exotic' New Particles Just Hours After Rebooting The Large Hadron Collider

Scientists Discover 'Exotic' New Particles Just Hours After Rebooting The Large Hadron Collider

The monster proton smasher has only been back on the grid for a matter of hours and she's already serving up brand-spanking new discoveries.

Scientists have made a spicy new discovery just hours after firing up the Large Hadron Collider.

The brainiacs at CERN, who are working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have already discovered three never-seen-before subatomic particles.

And they only booted the darn thing up this week (July 5 to be precise).

The scientists in Switzerland are working to unlock the building blocks of the universe and the LHC is already giving up the goods, the saucy minx.

The 27 kilometre-long LHC is the very machine that found the Higgs-Boson particle.

Also known as the God particle, Higgs-Boson is thought to be one of the keys that will help unlock the secrets of the universe, including the Big Bang.

Now, the boffins at CERN reckon they have observed a new kind of 'pentaquark' and the first-ever pair of 'tetraquarks', adding three new names to the very cool list of hadrons they've found with the LHC.

These new discoveries will help the 1,000-strong team of physicists at CERN to better understand how quarks bind together into composite particles.

For those that may not know what a quark is; they're elementary particles that like to group up. How cute.

So they like to run in packs. That can be groups of two or three to form hadrons, much like the protons and neutrons that make up an atomic nucleus.

Cool, right?

Anyway, the big brains at CERN are frothing over their latest find.

The two new tetraquarks, illustrated here as single units of tightly bound quarks.
CERN.

"The more analyses we perform, the more kinds of exotic hadrons we find," physicist Niels Tuning said in a statement.

"We're witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when a 'particle zoo' of hadrons started being discovered and ultimately led to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s."

Tuning added: "We're creating 'particle zoo 2.0'."

Got to love a guy who gets excited about his work.

LHC Beauty spokesperson Chris Parkes explained why CERN's latest discovery is so neat.

"Finding new kinds of tetraquarks and pentaquarks and measuring their properties will help theorists develop a unified model of exotic hadrons, the exact nature of which is largely unknown," he said in a statement.

"It will also help to better understand conventional hadrons."

Sounds cool if you ask us.

So what's next? Time travel? Understanding alternate dimensions? Let's not get too carried away here, but the future looks damn bright now the LHC is doing her thang once more.

Featured Image Credit: CERN.

Topics: Science, News, World News