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A YouTuber ticked an item off his bucket list after visiting Earth's giant underground particle collider.
Beneath the ground near Geneva, Switzerland lies a massive 27-kilometre (17-mile) tunnel. It’s colder than outer space, incredibly high-tech and home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
YouTuber AstroKobi expressed his lifelong dream to see it in person: "CERN has been the one experiment on Earth that I've been obsessed with since I was a child."
To get down into the tunnels, AstroKobi explained that he had to 'pass through a number of security checks' including a retina scanner. Only after was he able to descend more than 100 metres underground by elevator to explore the heart of the facility.
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After seeing the huge reactor in person, AstroKobi said: "I couldn't actually believe my eyes.[...] Nothing will compare to actually seeing it with my own eyes."
Founded in 1954, CERN is considered one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research.
However, conspiracy theorists have been more critical and dubbed it a 'death machine' while no other than billionaire Elon Musk called it 'demonic technology.'
Scientists work to collide at high energies to achieve particle acceleration and have been doing so for 14 years.
CERN fires off over 100 billion protons, creating two beams that race in opposite directions. These beams crash into each other 'every 25 nanoseconds' at near-light speed across four designated collision points.
"The width of the proton beams is about the width of a human hair," Dr. Clara Nellist, a physicist at CERN said on the video.
The researchers are studying these collisions to better understand how the universe works. More specifically, the energy and data produced help scientists investigate the tiniest building blocks of matter - and have already led to massive discoveries, like the Higgs boson particle.
In 2018, the machine shut down for maintenance and upgrades before reopening in April 2022.
The YouTuber later commented on his unforgettable experience: "This is probably my favourite video I have ever made and visiting CERN was honestly a bucket list item of mine."
And his audience was just as blown away.
"IT's mind blowing that we study anything the universe has to offer down to the smallest of the smallest particles," one viewer commented.
"OMG THATS SO COOL YOU GOT TO GO TO CERN! cool that you were invited to see such a huge piece of science!!!" added another.
"I had goosebumps by the end of the video," someone else replied.
