Mubasher: The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has unveiled plans to build a new massive particle accelerator, named the Future Circular Collider (FCC), with a total cost of more than $27 billion dollars.

Compared to the 27 kilometre-long current Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the FCC will be built over 100 km.

The LHC has helped in the exploration of a plethora of subatomic particles, including the Higgs boson, which explains how other particles get their mass. However; scientists are after more particles that could explain mysteries like dark matter and dark energy.

The particles accelerator is used to smash particles together at nearly the speed of light to find the elementary components of atoms, the building blocks of the universe.

CERN has released a design for the FCC, which is the result of the cooperation of 1,300 researchers from over 150 universities.

According to CERN, the FCC will be built in steps: firstly, a machine will be built to collide electrons and positrons; the second would smash protons into other protons.

"The search for new physics, for which a future circular collider would have a vast discovery potential, is therefore of paramount importance to making significant progress in our understanding of the universe," CERN said in a statement.

The ambitious project is expected to be funded over 20 years and be fully-functional by 2050.

The LHC was closed to undergo a group of upgrades and will resume work by spring 2021.