An animal, more precisely a creature belonging to the weasel family called a beech marten, knocked out the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after it gnawed through a power cable on a 66,000 kilovolt electrical transformer.

CERN said repairs caused by the short circuit should take a few more days since some connections were damaged. It said it will be necessary to examine the entire LHC following the severe electrical perturbation caused by the beech marten, also called a fouine.

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The reason officials at CERN weren't first sure what this creature was that took out the world's most powerful atom smasher is that only its unrecognizable charred remains remained after it was fried by thousands of volts of electricity.

That suicidal snack, however, caused technical issues and was enough to force engineers to safely shut down the LHC. Arnaud Marsollier, spokesman for CERN or the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said they were pretty sure the power outage was caused by a small animal.

He noted these events had occurred a few times before and part of the life of an installation as large as the LHC.

"Some connections were slightly damaged and we are at work to repair, what would not take long. We will be back online soon with a very exciting scientific program as the LHC will explore further the world of particles at high energy," he said.

LHC is housed in a tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference buried 175 meters beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva, Switzerland. It allows physicists to test the predictions of various theories of particle physics and high-energy physics. The LHC's greatest accomplishment to date was proving the existence of the Higgs-Boson or the "God particle."

CERN recently released free to the public 300 terabytes of data collected by the LHC. In 2014, CERN released 27 TB of research data.

CERN scientists and engineers have already explored the data and is making it available publicly.  Hopes to inspire students to take more interest in particle physics.

Tagsweasel, Large Hadron Collider, CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, beech marten, fouine