Two beams of protons zipped around the Large Hadron Collider on Friday, marking the return of the world’s largest particle accelerator after over three years on hiatus. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, spent the past three years doing maintenance work and making major upgrades to the system. Now, the group is preparing to start on a four-year stretch of data collection scientists hope will reveal new secrets of the universe.

“It is going to be two to three times better, in terms of the ability for our experiment to detect, collect and analyze data,” Marcella Bona, a particle physicist from Queen Mary University of London, told BBC.

This summer will mark the start of the third run of the LHC, referred to as Run 3....

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