The European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Large Hadron Collider is busted due to a helium leak. The $10 billion high-tech contraption has been damaged worse than previously thought and will be offline for at least two months, but most likely more. The accident posed no risk for personnel working at the LHC.

CERN officials said that a faulty electrical connection between two magnets melted, led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out. Warming up the whole damaged section so that it can be worked on will take a while, as well as cooling it back down. In addition, extensive repairs will be needed on that part of the LHC, but they do not pose technical problems.

Scientists said that such incidents happen somewhat frequently in particle accelerators, but because the Large Hadron Collider is cooled to near zero Kelvin degrees, minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit, all repairs trigger a long warm-up and cool-down process.

The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider and its highly sensitive detectors are effectively the world's most advanced particle physics experiment, which is also backed by some mega-powerful computer clusters all around the world to process the large amounts of data extracted from the detectors.

The powerful machine was designed to offer scientists an inside view at an explosion very similar to the one that caused the so-called ‘big bang’ phenomenon – a theory about a massive explosion responsible for the formation of the stars, the planets and everything else found in the Universe.

The experiment will be possible by using a series of magnetic accelerators to take beams of protons to up to 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV) and collide them together all across the machine’s 27 kilometers.

The project will look for signs of the Higgs particle, which is believed by some scientists to be responsible for giving other particles their mass. CERN said in its statement that its entire muon spectrometer system contains an area equal to three football fields, including 1.2 million independent electronic channels.