Higgs boson-like particle discovered.
Sorry if this is already posted somewhere (and if this is in the wrong sub-forum). I heard this on the radio and thought that it's a brilliant discovery:
Quote:
Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.
Both of the Higgs boson-hunting experiments at the LHC see a level of certainty in their data worthy of a "discovery".
More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however.
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A confirmation that this is the Higgs boson would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s.
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All the matter we can see appears to comprise just 4% of the Universe, the rest being made up by mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
A more exotic version of the Higgs could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the Universe that remains obscure.
It's also known as the "God particle". It'd be truly amazing if this does lead to an explanation of the unknown 96% of the universe. This is probably as impressive as that experiment conducted last year which showed some particles exceeding the speed of light (which was apparently impossible).