The “God Particle” has likely been located. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced early on Wednesday morning Eastern time that it had definitely found a new particle “consistent” with the long-sought Higgs boson, the elusive “God particle” predicted by the widely-accepted Standard Model of particle physics but never before observed until now.
The particle is the last major missing piece in the modern laws of physics, providing an explanation for how all matter in the universe has mass.
CERN will have to conduct further analyses to be sure the particle it has found is without a doubt the Higgs, but the agency was confident enough to issue preliminary results from its numerous proton beam collision experiments conducted at nearly lightspeed over the past three months using the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, located underground by CERN’s headquarters near Geneva, Switzerland.
The particle that CERN found has a mass of around 126.5 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), which is where earlier results had narrowed the likely energy range for Higgs to be found.
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer in a statement. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”
