The world's most powerful scientific instrument has been sabotaged by a weasel.

The small mammal shut down the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, last night.

The 17-mile, $7 billion superconducting machine is hoping to unlock the secrets of the universe by colliding particle beams traveling at close to the speed of light.

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It's one of the physics world's most complex machines, and it has been immobilized — temporarily — by a weasel. Spokesman Arnaud Marsollier says the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider at Cerm outside of Geneva, has suspended operations because a weasel invaded a transformer

THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 17- mile ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. Nobody knows what the facility might reveal with its collisions, which are mini-versions of the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago. Advertisement

But that work has now been put on hold.

Engineers looking into the power outage found the charred remains of the creature that had bitten its way through a power cable.

'We had electrical problems, and we are pretty sure this was caused by a small animal,' says Arnaud Marsollier, head of press for Cern.

While they have yet to conduct a detail post mortem of the body, Marsollier says they the unfortunate creature was 'a weasel, probably.'

The shutdown comes as the LHC is preparing for another run at colliding particles together to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Nobody knows what the facility might reveal with its collisions, which are mini-versions of the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago.

Scientists hope they could top their discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 - a particle which helps explain how the universe got its mass.

But researchers will have to wait while workers bring the machine back online, which could take few weeks.

'It may be mid-May' before it's running again, said Marsollier.

This isn't the first time wildlife has halted the work on discovery the origins of the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Pictured is a view of an LHC dipole magnet. Thousands of 'lattice magnets' on the LHC, similar to the one shown, bend and tighten the particles' trajectory. They are responsible for keeping the beams stable and precisely aligned.

THE HIGGS BOSON The Higgs boson was a key missing piece in the jigsaw for physicists in trying to understand how the universe works when it was discovered in 2012. A fraction of a second after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe, an invisible energy field called the Higgs field formed. A boson is a type of sub-atomic particle. Every energy field has a specific particle that governs its interaction with what's around it. The Higgs field is a kind of 'cosmic treacle' and as particles pass through it, they picked up mass, giving them size and shape.Without it, particles would simply whizz around space in the same way as light does. Advertisement

In 2009, the 'God Machine' overheated after a passing bird dropped a baguette into a high voltage installation which was powering a cooling unit.

Scientists looking into a failure of the cryogenic cooling plant found a piece of baguette had caused the malfunction.

'This was a story that was told, but we never knew exactly what happened,' says Marsollier, but he added it's not impossible.

'We're in the countryside, you have wild animals.'

The Cern facility features series of accelerators, the largest of which is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is built inside a tunnel more than 17 miles (27km) long

It took thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians decades to plan and build the machine, which continues to operate at the very boundaries of scientific knowledge.

The machine is housed underground, deep beneath the border separating France from Switzerland, and it's already made some significant discoveries.

In 2012, scientists at Cern discovered the Higgs boson.

And last month, they announced that they'd found a new class of particles known as pentaquarks.

There are a large variety of magnets in the LHC. However the big ones are the main dipoles (pictured). These move particles around the 27 km circumference of the collider. They generate powerful 8.4 tesla magnetic fields – more than 100,000 times more powerful than the Earth's magnetic field

Scientists now want to shed more light on 'dark matter', thought to make up some 96 percent of the stuff of the universe.

They also hope to reveal new details about super-symmetry, or SUSY, under which all visible particles have unseen counterparts.

Unexplained by the Standard Model of particle physics, its existence might lead to the discovery of a whole new set of particles and possibly even a fifth fundamental force.

'It would be something completely beyond the Standard Model, and the tip of an iceberg of a large new set of particles,' Professor John Ellis, theoretical physicist at Kings College London told MailOnline, 'if it exists.'

Two other detectors at CERN, ATLAS and CMS, are searching for new physics by counting particle decays that ended up in two photons, and found a potential new particle.

If it turns out to be real, and not a blip, this would be a huge discovery.

The left image shows one of the machines in the Crystal Laboratory and on the right is a general view of the one of the four beam lines: T8, T9, T10 and T11 being run at CERN in The East Area Hall, building 157



