Podcast Extra: CERN

During a visit to Geneva in September 2016, the Awesome Astronomy team stopped looking out into the universe for a while to delve into the impossibly tiny world of subatomic particles and fundamental forces that fuels the heartbeat of the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Dr Steven Goldfarb, an experimental particle physicist from the University of Michigan, led a tour of the ATLAS Control Room, a few metres above the largest and most advanced engineering experiment the world has ever seen – the Large Hadron Collider. Then we sat down to enjoy a light lunch and discuss the ground-breaking work, detections and knowledge building that only CERN can accomplish.

Naturally, we also delve into the big issues in astronomy today – such as dark matter, the matter/antimatter imbalance and extra dimensions, all of which are being explored by CERN.

So, for anyone who's excited by the frontiers of physics or puzzled by what CERN is or does, we've recorded a special podcast extra to shed some light on the impossibly complex and tantalisingly exciting world of particle physics, right on the very cutting edge.

This podcast extra should explain in simple terms:

• What are the Large Hadron Collider and CERN
• The International collaboration required
• The significance of the Higgs Boson
• Why gravity causes us so many problems
• The frontiers of our understanding of the universe
• The search for unified fundamental forces, extra dimensions and exotic new matter

With special thanks to CERN and Dr Steve Goldfarb