Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator in Switzerland have submitted proposals for a new, much larger, supercollider, Ednews reports referring to the BBC.

Its aim is to discover new particles that would revolutionise physics and lead to a more complete understanding of how the Universe works.
If approved, it will be three times larger than the current giant machine.

But its £17bn price tag has raised some eyebrows, with one critic describing the expenditure as "reckless".
That money - which is only the initial construction cost - would come from member nations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) including the UK, and some experts have questioned whether it makes economic sense.

The biggest achievement of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was the detection of a new particle called the Higgs Boson in 2012. But since then its ambition to track down two holy grails of physics - dark matter and dark energy - have proved elusive and some researchers believe there are cheaper options.

The new machine is called the Future Circular Collider (FCC). Cern's director general, Prof Fabiola Gianotti, told BBC News that, if approved, it will be a "beautiful machine".

"It is a tool that will allow humanity to make enormous steps forwards in answering questions in fundamental physics about our knowledge of the Universe. And to do that we need a more powerful instrument to address these questions," she said.