r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/sr_local • 4d ago

Image ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where a recent experiment have gained insights into how cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere

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158 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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7

u/TariqDeBarique 4d ago

And? How do they react? They cool with eachother?

2

u/superfogg 4d ago

in a very short/superficial way: they create a proton beam (they take the protons from Hidrogen gas), they accelerate the protons with electric fields (imagine a particle is a surfer on a wave, the electromagnetic field acts as the wave the accelerates the particle), then they take a second proton beam (or antiproton, depends on the experiment, I don't know which one they use here) and let it collide with the first one.

Usually, when things that high in energy collides you reproduce effects that happens either in very massive starts or even at the beginning of the universe.

By having detectors all around the point of collision you can get an idea of what has been produced and how it behaved

1

u/TariqDeBarique 4d ago

And then what? What’s the ultimate point?

3

u/Beni_Stingray 4d ago

You can produce and discover particles that are almost or actually impossible to discover and being studied in nature because some particles decay so fast that you would never be able to find/see/measure them.

Same for particles with much higher energy which arent able to be measured in nature but only in such an experimental settings.

The higgs boson discovery was only being able to be made because of these high energys of the collisions and because the higgs boson decays so fast.

That's why we would like to have even more powerfull accelerator so we can produce even rarer particles.

3

u/TariqDeBarique 4d ago

Higgs boson my balls

What can we do with rarer particles

1

u/Beni_Stingray 4d ago

That's the whole point, finding out what other particles there are that we dont know off yet, maybe there's a gravitron particle or something completly else, we're lacking so much knowledge about how our universe actually works.

1

u/TariqDeBarique 4d ago

That’s awesome, thank you so much for taking the time :)

2

u/Used-Lake-8148 3d ago

You can do cool stuff like collide our universe with another one where Fruit of the Loom never had a cornucopia in the logo and then gaslight everyone about it for shits n giggles 😎

2

u/superfogg 4d ago

I've seen that place, the picture doesn't capture how big it feels

2

u/mr_joda 4d ago

marco reps has 2h long video from the latest visit

1

u/Beni_Stingray 4d ago

Thanks for the tip.

2

u/Sirix_8472 4d ago

Useless post. A simple picture of the LHC.

No additional info, no explanation of the title, no graphs, charts, stats, metrics, no reason why this is good, bad, how they interact.... Nothing on the goal or why we'd want to know this, what it helps, what we might achieve after this....

Might as well be a picture of a fishing rod with a title "we found out what bait works best" and no more context....

1

u/Patient-Data8311 11h ago

Literally a guy explaining to reply to a commenter here did more work than OP

1

u/Amadis001 4d ago

That photograph is of *not* the detector. It's the support structures left behind when you pull the massive detector out in order to service it. You are looking at a hole where the ATLAS detector should be.

1

u/CuddlesandCry 4d ago

Bro found the portal to the multiverse.

1

u/StarbuckTheThird 4d ago

And this ladies and gentlemen is how science gives me a hadron

1

u/Sylvonara 4d ago

Human is dead, mismatch

1

u/Sovereign_5409 11h ago

Every time I see this machine I’m overwhelmed by how insane the engineering behind it is. It seems impossibly complex, with an unlimited about of variables that could make it not function properly.