BIG BANG

Scientists Discover 2 New Particles

Using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

We just moved one step closer to understanding the vastness of our universe. A team of scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced Wednesday that they have discovered two new subatomic particles that have never been seen before. They believe that the discovery could help explain how things work beyond the “Standard Model”—a physics theory of complete fundamental interactions—adding to our knowledge of the basic building blocks of matter. “Nature was kind and gave us two particles for the price of one,” said Matthew Charles, one of the CERN collaborators. The two subatomic particles were discovered using the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile tunnel near Geneva that forces particles to crash into each other at high speeds. The LHC was also used in the discovery of the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle,” in 2012.