Now ready to roll: Image shows the magnetic core being loaded into the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector of the LHC during construction.

Credit: AFP

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GENEVA: Particle physicists were jubilant last night after the long-awaited mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos passed its first tests with flying colours.

Cheers, applause and the pop of a champagne cork – rather than the cataclysmic suck of a black hole, which doomsayers had feared – marked the breakthrough at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Robert Aymar, the organisation's director general, hailed it as a "historic day" for CERN and mankind's thirst for knowledge. Humans have "a quest for [knowing] where they came from and where they should go, whether the Universe will end, and where the Universe will go in the future," he said.

Corks popping, not a big bang

Just after 7:30 am GMT (4:30 pm Sydney time), a first proton beam was injected into the LHC's massive circular tunnel at CERN, near Geneva, and accelerated to nearly the speed of light.

Superconducting magnets steered the counter-rotating beams so that strings of protons smashed together in four huge laboratories, fleetingly replicating some of the conditions that prevailed during the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

Arrays of detectors will trace the sub-atomic 'rubble' spewed out from the collision, looking for signatures of novel particles.

CERN scientists have ruled out fears that the process could create a black hole whose super-gravity would swallow the Earth, or a theoretical particle called a strangelet that would turn the planet into goo.

The mission aims to resolve some of the greatest enigmas in physics: whether a so-called God particle exists that would account for the nature of mass; what the explanation is of dark matter and dark energy which together account for 96 per cent of the Cosmos; and also whether additional dimensions exist parallel to our own.

Taking it slow

Wednesday's start-up marked the start of a long and cautious commissioning process to check equipment and operational procedures before these collisions can properly get underway.

The first batch of protons was halted, sector by sector, to verify that monitoring systems and the steering magnets were working properly. Their speed was purposely slowed for the inspection process.

The clockwise beam completed this first test lap in under an hour, causing an eruption of joy and an outbreak of bubbly in the control room. A test of the anticlockwise beam took place later and again the operation was problem-free.

"Technically, everything works the way it should work and the path ahead is very, very clear," said Jos Engelen, the LHC's chief scientific officer.