• Question: What is a partical excelerator and what does it do?

    Asked by Melbelle to Scott on 7 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by Josh.
    • Photo: Scott Lawrie

      Scott Lawrie answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      A particle accelerator is a big machine that takes the electrons or protons of ordinary stuff and makes them move very very fast. So my part of the accelerator is joined onto an ordinary bottle of hydrogen gas! It takes the hydrogen and gives it lots of energy so it moves very fast. We crash these fast particles into things to learn about the universe.

Comments

  • Photo: Adrian

    Adrian commented on :

    A particle accelerator takes a particle and gives it a larger speed. We collide this particle with another particle to produce microscopes that zoom inside matter. At CERN we have the largest particle accelerator in the world. It’s called the Large Hadron Collider. Thanks to it we discovered the Higgs boson. We hope we will discover new particles still.