The new ALMA observations of HD 142527 found that the star is surrounded by cosmic dust that could be smashing together to form planets. Especially encouraging is a bright "knot" in on the northern side of this disk — a submillimeter emission that is 30 times stronger than the southern side emission.
And the accelerator system that supplies the LHC with its proton particle beams - which are smashed together to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang - is up and running for the first time since 2012.
To produce the massive amounts of gas -- more than 200 million billion tons -- the comets would have to be smashing together at a rate of once every five minutes.
The beams of proton particles to be smashed together will create a collision with about 13 times the energy of a flying mosquito.
The technical debate involves questions like whether the particles should be accelerated in a straight line or on a circular racetrack, whether electrons or their much heavier cousins, protons, should be smashed together and just what technologies should be used to push the particles to the tremendous energies that would be necessary.
CERN is the world's biggest particle physics lab – home of the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are smashed together at mind-boggling speeds.
When subatomic particles are smashed together at high energy, they create a complex mix of secondary particles.
At the scene, two cars were smashed together and burned, but neither appeared to have been distorted from an explosion inside.
The atomic bomb that exploded above Hiroshima was simple: two hemispheres of weapons-grade uranium were smashed together, instantly creating a critical mass that released a blast of energy comparable to that created by exploding 15,000 tons of TNT.
What is being smashed together in this case are two protons, which will collide after being whipped up to top speeds by cruising around the collider's 17 miles of underground tunnels.
