Take a look into the eye of the collider. The STAR detector, home to trillions of particle collisions every year, is one of two enormous ‘digital cameras’ we use at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to capture snapshots of particles busting open.
This picture is of the awesomely named Time Projection Chamber, which has been undergoing months of upgrades and maintenance work. During the summer, when the collider wasn’t running, our technicians and engineers checked each cable connection, upgraded the image sensors, and installed new superconducting magnets to steer the particle beams into perfect head-on collisions.
Now, the detector has been put back into place and we’re gearing up for the next run of RHIC in a few months.