Small metal piece delays restart of CERN's Big Bang Machine anywhere from 2 days to 5 weeks

Large Hadron Collider tunnel photograph by Maximilien Brice. (CERN)

WASHINGTON – Officials say a minor glitch will delay the re-start of Europe's multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider either a couple of days or more than a month.

On Tuesday, Arnaud Marsollier, chief spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said a small metallic piece near a magnet has to be removed before the machine fires its circulating beam, which had been scheduled for this week.

If the removal is easy, the beam start will only be pushed back by a couple days. If not, Marsollier says the repairs and the needed warm up of the machine could take up to five weeks.

The collider found the elusive Higgs Boson then was upgraded for two years. Now scientists hope to use it to find signs of the unseen dark universe.