Circumference26,659 m
12,695Surfboards
274,835Softball diameters
222Ski jump hills
26.659 km ring
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Large Hadron Collider
The world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator/Everyday Places
Buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider is a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets that smashes protons together at 99.9999991% the speed of light. It confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012, which justified a few decades of construction and roughly $13.25 billion. The magnets are cooled to 1.9 Kelvin, making the LHC colder than outer space.
Measurements
Depth underground175 m
1,167Sandwich halves
9.57Bowling alleys
Maximum depth beneath the surface
Energy per beam362 trillion J
84.2 trillionHand claps
1.7 thousandthsTsar Bombas
3.6 quintillionKey presses
362 MJ per proton beam at full energy
Operating temperature1.9 K
1.1 thousandthsMolten steel pours
6.7 thousandthsBeer cellar temps
Colder than outer space (2.7 K)
Proton speed300 million m/s
273 millionWaddling penguins
1 billionConveyor belts
4.3 millionGolf ball drives
99.9999991% of the speed of light
Tunnel diameter3.8 m
7.6Tree stump diameters
4.2 hundredthsFootball field lengths
Total magnet mass27.3 million kg
606,667Grocery carts
54.6 quadrillionParamecia
Approximately 27,300 tonnes of magnets