The world's largest atom-smashing machine is most famous for proving the existence of the Higgs boson in one of the most important scientific experiments of recent times.

But the Large Hadron Collider has now gone viral for all the wrong reasons - after the BBC made the unfortunate mistake of switching the 'r' and the 'd' to give it a whole new meaning.

The blunder rather overshadowed the excitement at the huge collider - which has undergone more than two years of upgrades - being restarted.

Scientists hope the machine [not the BBC's sexually explicit typo] will now run non-stop for the next three years.

BBC News made the unfortunate mistake of switching the 'r' and the 'd' to give it a whole new meaning

The Large Hadron Collider is housed in a giant, underground, circular tunnel in Geneva.

Physicists hope it will unlock even more fundamental secrets of the universe having proved the existence of the Higgs boson, which is thought to give mass to other particles.

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They are aiming to see dark matter for the first time thanks to the device's upgrarde.

It was shut down so its energy levels could be almost doubled, allowing scientists to carry out more extreme experiments.

Now the physicists operating the machine have their sights on dark matter, the invisible, undetectable material that makes up 84 per cent of matter in the universe and binds galaxies together yet whose nature is unknown.

If they are able to detect and describe dark matter, it will mark a huge leap forward in our understanding of the universe.

The huge collider has undergone more than two years of upgrades, to give it double the power

The particle accelerator has already found the Higgs boson – the God Particle – which is thought to give mass to other particles

All this was somewhat overlooked following the BBC blunder that quickly went viral on Twitter.

A BBC spokesman said: 'There was an unfortunate typing error within a caption during the BBC News Channel's coverage of the Hadron Collider restart. This was quickly corrected.'

This is not the first time the BBC has been pulled up for an embarrassing typo.

During last year's election it replaced the 'r' with a 't' when referring to the Scottish electoral constituency of Paisley and Renfrewshire South.