The Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at Cern in Switzerland has been taken offline after a curious weasel chewed through an electrical wire.
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It said the weasel caused a “severe electrical perturbation”, damaging the machine’s transformer connections.
CERN spokesman says that technicians are working hard to bring the machine back online but it may take few days or weeks to fix it and to get things back to work. Marsollier added that the LHC is in a wooded area and that CERN believes the critter was most likely “a weasel, probably”. “It may take a few days to fix but such events happened a few times in the past and are part of the life of such a large installation”.
As NPR notes, this isn’t the first time animals have rallied in defense of the universe’s secrets. But, he tells New Scientist, the equipment is fine and the fix should be easy. In 2009, Nature reported that a baguette dropped by a flying bird also caused similar power outages to the Large Hadron Collider. But this vast piece of technology, meant to attempt to recreate the conditions at the very dawn of time, has been taken down by a rather less powerful entity.
“We had collisions at low intensity recently, this is all part of the commissioning, we check that everything is working well, that the detectors are ready”. Upon closer inspection of the charred remains, the small mammal was then found out to not be a weasel, but a marten – a relative of the weasel common in the Northern Hemisphere. However, none have been observed in Ireland and most off-shore islands.
They are less common where their prey – small rodents – are scarce.
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Way back in 2008, CERN got their Large Hadron Collider online, sparking fears of black holes and the end of the world in a large percentage of the population.
