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This New Particle Has Physicists Very Excited—If It’s Real

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Tests conducted in Switzerland may have uncovered what researchers say could be a new fundamental particle of nature similar to the Higgs Boson.

Photons that emerged from tests conducted by two different research teams at CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—carried about 750 billion electron volts of energy, potentially the result of radioactive decay of a new fundamental particle.

If confirmed, the discovery of such a particle could have significant implications for the understanding of particle physics. Some physicists have suggested that the particle could be a graviton, a theoretical particle of gravitational energy that has not yet been proven to exist. A more likely theory is that a new particle is a heavier cousin of the Higgs Boson, a particle thought to give other particles mass whose discovery in 2013 confirmed decades of research.

Read More: You Should Care Big Time About the Big Bang News

But researchers note that the testing remains far from conclusive and that the discovery could very well be a coincidence. The result falls far short of the five-sigma confidence level—considered the gold standard in science, when there’s only a 1-in-3.5-million chance of something occurring coincidentally. Indeed, researchers said they wouldn’t have announced the findings at all had they not been uncovered at the same time by two separate teams.

“I don’t think there is anyone around who thinks this is conclusive,” New York University physicist Kyle Cranmer, also a CERN researcher, told the New York Times. “But it would be huge if true.”

See the Top 20 Winners of Nikon Small World Microscopic Photography Contest

Nikon Small World 2015
Eye of a honey bee (Apis mellifera) covered in dandelion pollen at 120x magnification.Ralph Claus Grimm
Nikon Small World 2015
Mouse colon colonized with human microbiota at 63x magnification.Kristen Earle, Gabriel Billings, KC Huang and Justin Sonnenburg
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Intake of a humped bladderwort (Utricularia gibba), a freshwater carnivorous plant at 100x magnification.Dr. Igor Siwanowicz
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Lab-grown human mammary gland organoid at 100x magnification.Daniel H. Miller and Ethan S. Sokol
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Live imaging of perfused vasculature in a mouse brain with glioblastoma taken using the Optical Frequency Domain Imaging System. Dr. Giorgio Seano and Dr. Rakesh K. Jain
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Spore capsule of a moss (Bryum sp.)Henri Koskinen
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Starfish imaged using confocal microscopy at 10x magnification. Evan Darling
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Nerves and blood vessels in a mouse ear skin at 10x magnification.Dr. Tomoko Yamazaki
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Young buds of Arabidopsis (a flowering plant) at 40x magnification.Dr. Nathanael Prunet
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Clam shrimp (Cyzicus mexicanus), live specimen ,at 25x magnification.Ian Gardiner
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Fern sorus at varying levels of maturity at 20x magnification.Rogelio Moreno Gill
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Developing sea mullet (Mugil cephalus) embryos at 40x magnification.Hannah Sheppard-Brennand
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Tentacles of a carnivorous plant (Drosera sp.) at 20x magnification.Jose R. Almodovar
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Australian grass (Austrostipa nodosa) seed at 5x magnification.Viktor Sykora
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Anther of a flowering plant (Arabidopsis thaliana) at 20x magnification.Dr. Heiti Paves
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Feeding rotifers (Floscularia ringens) at 50x magnification. Charles Krebs
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Black witch-hazel (Trichodactylus crinitus) leaf producing crystals to defend against herbivores at 100x magnification.David Maitland
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Hairyback worm (Chaetonotus sp.) and algae (Micrasterias sp.) at 400x magnification. Roland Gross
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Planktonic larva of a horseshoe worm (phoronid) at 450x magnification. Dr. Richard R. Kirby
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Suction cups on the diving beetle (Dytiscus sp.) foreleg at 50x magnification.Frank Reiser

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Write to Justin Worland at justin.worland@time.com