Marking a noteworthy development in their endeavors towards ascertaining how the universe took shape, scientists Monday reported that the efforts to replicate post-Big Bang conditions, via the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), met with latest success with the first-ever collision of proton beams in a 27-kilometre tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border.

The long-awaited proton-colliding event came barely three days after physicists began circulating the first beam of protons inside the ring of the LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator was under repair for over a year, after the earlier unsuccessful attempt nearly 14 months back.

Scientists said that the smashing together of the protons, traveling approximately at the speed of light, occurred at a relatively low energy of 900 billion electron volts (GeV), with each of the beam contributing 450 GeV.

With Dan Green - a particle physicist at Illinois’ Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and a member of the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid experiment - noting that “Things are really moving extraordinarily fast,” the experiment is likely to move to its next sometime in the coming few days prior to a planned winter break.

The next stage will comprise an attempt to successfully collide the proton beams at a stepped up speed of 1.2 teraelectron volts (TeV) apiece, which will be the highest energy level ever achieved by any particle accelerator.