The Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), has begun smashing particles together today, as it starts its second phase of work.
The multi-billion euro experiment under the Swiss-French border has undergone a two-year upgrade, which has enabled it to run at almost double the energy levels of its first period of operation.
The Large Hadron Collider consists of two 27km-long circular tubes through which protons are fired at almost the speed of light, before being smashed together to try to open up a window on the dawn of the universe.
During its first season of operation, the LHC provided large amounts of ground-breaking data, most notably proof of the existence of the so-called Higgs boson particle, which gives all matter mass.
But the collider was shut down in 2013 to allow for repairs and upgrades.
These were completed in April, and since then the machine has been re-commissioned, with the energy of its beams brought up to levels that are twice what they previously ran at.
That unprecedented power is finally being put to use today, as CERN physicists begin gathering data from particle collisions at these higher energies.
It is hoped the resumption of the experiments will herald a new era of discovery around weighty but perplexing topics like dark energy and dark matter, anti-matter, and alternative theories of particle physics.
The LHC is back in business! Welcome to physics at #13TeV! https://t.co/b3QSHbV8j7 http://t.co/Zko4yfjD2R pic.twitter.com/l3ocZNplz9
— CERN (@CERN) June 3, 2015