What was the universe like in the first few moments of its existence? We may not have a time machine to go back and witness that exact moment, but scientists are now able to recreate that brief and momentous time in the lab.

Today, the operators of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced that the machine (the world's largest particle accelerator) had achieved stable beams, and was successfully smashing together tiny particles of lead at incredibly high energies.

The collision reached energies that were twice as large as those produced by any previous collision experiment (1045 trillion electron-volts).