What happened to Earth's 17-mile long 'death machine' that people feared would destroy the planet

There is a scientific structure some dubbed the 'death machine' that runs for 17 miles underneath a major European city.

It's one of the biggest advancements in recent history of the science world, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and it is crucial for scientists to test new theories, make discoveries and recreate matter from the Big Bang, further developing our knowledge of the universe.

Dubbed by some media outlets as 'the death machine' when it first launched, the 17-mile, 100m deep tunnel is beneath Geneva.

The LHC is massive on the inside (CERN)

What is the Large Hadron Collider?

Located at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, the LHC is where the biggest boffins in the world collide protons at the highest ever energies achieved in a particle accelerator.

Several fundamental particles have been uncovered in the tunnel such as the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle in the standard model - for all you science nuts out there.

Basically, in these tunnels, particles are made to travel at unfathomable speeds before colliding with one another, with their reactions and produced energies being studied.

Back in 2015, some newspapers claimed that scientists could make contact with parallel universes through their discoveries, while the Big Bang theory could be disproved. Needless to say, this hasn't happened.

Another theory that was popular with the LHC is that it will end up creating a black hole that swallows us all.

But this has no real basis in science despite many having fears.

There have been plans to make it even bigger, though they have not materialised (CERN)

What's the latest update on the LHC?

CERN published an official update earlier this year, detailing that the recommissioning of CERN's accelerator complex has gathered pace, as the scientific community awaits upcoming particle beam experiments.

Following the annual winter break over the early months of 2024, they revealed that several machines were set to 'resume beam operation'.

They added: "The first particle beams will reach the LHC on 11 March.

"The expectations for 2024 are high. In the LHC, the focus is on luminosity production with proton–proton collisions.

"The luminosity is an important indicator of the performance of an accelerator: it is proportional to the number of collisions that occur in the experiments in a given amount of time.

"The higher the luminosity, the more data the experiments can gather to allow them to observe rare processes."

There is still one more month to go until the 2024 run comes to a close, as the winter break begins again on 28 October.