Of all the things set to happen during the solar eclipse on April 8 — an increase in traffic accidents, swaths of the US being plunged into darkness and a handful of idiots inevitably blinding themselves by staring directly at the sun — there’s one event that probably won’t come to pass: CERN opening a portal to hell.


Ahead of the astrological event, several conspiracy theorists are convinced that CERN — a.k.a European Organization for Nuclear Research, famed for their Large Hadron Collider  — is up to something out of a bad Stranger Things plot, speculating that the group would be harnessing the power of the eclipse to open a portal that just may end humanity.



“Why is CERN being reactivated on April 8, the same day as the infamous eclipse?” read a post from conspiracy Facebook page Mass Awakening, one of several touting the theory. “My gut instinct is that something really big is being planned for that day... perhaps a total takedown of both the grid and society in general worldwide…”


While it’d be nice to put an end to all of the bulls—t here on Earth — we’ve seen more than enough of JoJo Siwa  — it seems there are several holes in this tin-foil-tinged theory. Alongside the fact that the Large Hadron Collider fired up exactly one month ago on March 8 after a “brief winter technical stop,” per USA Today, opening any type of portal is far beyond the scope of CERN’s research.




“What we do at CERN is doing particle physics with accelerators such as the LHC, and this has little to do with astrophysics in a direct way,”  a spokesperson for the organization told Poynter. “So there is no link between the solar eclipse on Monday 8th April, and what we do at CERN.”


But you don’t need to take it from CERN. Back in 2022, the nuclear research group found themselves at the center of similar conspiracies about allegedly opening a portal to hell, ones that University of Buffalo physics professor Dejan Stojkovic insisted had “no chance whatsoever” of being true.


"To create a black hole or a wormhole, even microscopic ones, with our current technology, in the context of our standard theories of gravity, we need an accelerator as big as the whole universe," Stojkovic explained in a sit down with USA Today.


Considering that the Large Hadron Collider boasts just a 27-kilometer circumference — a fraction of the universe’s roughly 46.5 billion light-year-expanse — it seems we won’t be seeing any portals to hell any time soon.


But hey, considering how things are going back here on Earth, a girl can dream.