With the Wednesday official startup of Europe's Large Hadron Collider, a new scientific wonder of the world opened for business after 14 years of preparation.

The USD 10 billion particle accelerator is the biggest, most expensive science machine on earth, designed to explore mysteries ranging from dark matter and missing antimatter to the existence of extra, unseen dimensions in space.

The Large Hadron Collider passed its first test Wednesday and scientists reported that the powerful tool was nearly ready to reveal how the tiniest particles were first created after the "big bang" - the widespread theory of the massive explosion that formed the stars, the planets and everything in the Universe.

Scientists, journalists and dignitaries gathered in the control room at Europe's CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, and Tension mounted as scientists huddled around computer screens. After a few trial runs, they fired as beams of protons were sent all the way around the collider's 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring of supercooled pipes for the first time.

Even though it is likely to be several weeks before the first significant collisions, the physicists celebrated with champagne when the white dots flashed on the blue screens of the control room, showing a successful crossing of the accelerator's finish line.

The beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired at nearly the speed of light in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide.

The collider's two huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

Many scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC, which provides much greater power than earlier colliders. However, its start did not go without controversy. There have been many objections coming from those who feared the collision of protons could eventually endanger the Earth by creating micro black holes with gravity so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

No such problem occurred Wednesday, although the accelerator is still probably a year away from full power.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed USD 531 million. Japan, Canada, Russia and India - also observers - are other major contributors.

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