Who would have thought that the world's most powerful particle collider can be shut down by a small mammal in the shape of a weasel?

The Large Hadron Collider is the also the world's biggest machine housed in the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) headquarters underground in Geneva, Switzerland. This powerful atom smasher is specifically designed to collide together particle beams in high energy states, at almost the speed of light.

Like Us on Facebook

However, on Friday, the LHC lost power and mysteriously became off grid. Now, engineers are conducting an investigation that resulted in stumbling upon the charred remains of a "furry creature" that gnawed its way through a high voltage power cable.

According to CERN's head of press relations, Arnaud Marsollier, we have had electrical problems and we are pretty certain that this was caused a small animal, adding that this animal was most likely a weasel, although the team could not confirm since the remains were charred and indiscernible. 

Marsollier adds, CERN headquarters is located in the countryside, so of course, it is natural to have wild animals everywhere.

The collider first became operational in 2008 which consists of a ring of superconducting magnets that span 17 miles long that are linked to several massive structures which boost its energy while particle beams of energy go around continuously. 

Back in 2012, the collider was responsible for a milestone discovery of a fundamental particle known as the "God particle" or Higgs boson, where scientists François Englert and Peter W. Higgs won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2013. The Higgs is crucial in the understanding of the Standard Model of physics, and how particles interact with each other. This can also shed light to invisible dark matter that supposedly consists of most of the universe's mass. 

Now, since this weasel "attack", CERN officials say that the particle collider will become fully operational not until mid May. This shutdown is unexpected which arrived when LHC began its analysis and physics data delivery for the first time in the span of more than two years.

During the past two years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the CERN facility underwent shutdown and recommissioning that scheduled to restart collisions in March 2016 at higher energy levels of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) which is almost double the collision energy from the previous runs. The LHC is also scheduled to run its beams around continuously for the next three years.