More info: www.bbc.co.uk Playlist: www.youtube.com Radio 4 joins CERN on 10 September 2008 as scientists attempt to discover more about the origins of the Universe by recreating the aftermath of the Big Bang. Here’s Brian Cox on particle collisions and journeys into the unknown.

think back to when you saw your first magic trick and how amazing it was until you found out how the trick was done !

Early heavy ion events in first heavy-ion fill with stable beam collisions seen in the ATLAS Experiment, 8 November 2010.

An inside look at the LHC

Ugh. People freaking out about science with no good reason to gives me a headache.

Created by Daniel Lederman Music by Fabien Chombart (vocals by Roxane Sigre)

Orbiting nearly 650 kilometres above the Earth, the Hubble space telescope has been our most powerful window on soaring star factories. It has been instrumental in providing the existence of black holes and has captured the cataclysmic end of stars far larger than our own sun. Rocking a long-established theory about universe existence, Hubble proved that the universe is expanding more and more quickly, which could ultimately destroy our entire universe. The telescope also provided the first stunningly-detailed images that illustrate how embryonic stars are born from gas and dust clouds. First recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054 AD, Hubble has tracked the debris from a thousand year old supernova still moving into space at approximately 5 million kilometres an hour. When scientists focused Hubble on Jupiter, they were able to watch in real time the devastating effect of a comet hitting the massive planet. But the 12-ton telescope will soon be lost forever as it slowly spirals towards Earth, and astronauts will travel back into space to repair Hubble before the telescope is eventually shut down and sent back to Earth.

Orbiting nearly 650 kilometres above the Earth, the Hubble space telescope has been our most powerful window on soaring star factories. It has been instrumental in providing the existence of black holes and has captured the cataclysmic end of stars far larger than our own sun. Rocking a long-established theory about universe existence, Hubble proved that the universe is expanding more and more quickly, which could ultimately destroy our entire universe. The telescope also provided the first stunningly-detailed images that illustrate how embryonic stars are born from gas and dust clouds. First recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054 AD, Hubble has tracked the debris from a thousand year old supernova still moving into space at approximately 5 million kilometres an hour. When scientists focused Hubble on Jupiter, they were able to watch in real time the devastating effect of a comet hitting the massive planet. But the 12-ton telescope will soon be lost forever as it slowly spirals towards Earth, and astronauts will travel back into space to repair Hubble before the telescope is eventually shut down and sent back to Earth.

Orbiting nearly 650 kilometres above the Earth, the Hubble space telescope has been our most powerful window on soaring star factories. It has been instrumental in providing the existence of black holes and has captured the cataclysmic end of stars far larger than our own sun. Rocking a long-established theory about universe existence, Hubble proved that the universe is expanding more and more quickly, which could ultimately destroy our entire universe. The telescope also provided the first stunningly-detailed images that illustrate how embryonic stars are born from gas and dust clouds. First recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054 AD, Hubble has tracked the debris from a thousand year old supernova still moving into space at approximately 5 million kilometres an hour. When scientists focused Hubble on Jupiter, they were able to watch in real time the devastating effect of a comet hitting the massive planet. But the 12-ton telescope will soon be lost forever as it slowly spirals towards Earth, and astronauts will travel back into space to repair Hubble before the telescope is eventually shut down and sent back to Earth.

What is a strangelet?: Strangelets are theorized cosmological objects composed of an exotic form of matter known as strange matter or quark matter. This form of matter is created in the cores of particularly massively neutron stars. In neutron stars, the remnants of collapsed stars with masses between 4 and 8 times that of our sun, pressure and temperature is so intense that the protons and electrons in atomic nuclei fuse to become neutrons. The resultant matter is sometimes referred to as neutronium, a sea of neutrons packed far more densely than conventional matter. Sometimes the pressure and gravity in the centres of neutron stars is so massive that the neutronium collapses into its constituent particles, quarks. This results in agglomerations of so-called strange quarks bound to each other directly much in the same manner that the transition from conventional star to neutron star results in seas of neutrons bound directly together. The names physicists have given this type of matter are “quark matter” or “strange matter”. This may be regarded as a phase change, like changing from a liquid to a solid, only at densities many orders of magnitude greater than those occuring in this solar system. It has been hypothesized that strangelets (sub-stellar agglomerations of strange matter) may be able to exist independently from the quark stars which created them. If so, there may be many strangelets in this universe, a possible explanation for the dark matter problem. Since …