Now, Even More Evidence of Higgs Boson

One of the teams hunting the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider says it has pinned down the particle so conclusively that there's only a one-in-300 million chance it does not exist. When the team announced that it had discovered the Higgs on July 4, it said it had achieved only a "5 sigma" level of certainty, the minimum to claim a discovery, the BBC explains. That amounts to a one-in-3.5 million chance the particle doesn't exist.

It's impossible to directly observe the particle, which exists for only a fraction of a second before decaying into something else. But the team has been conducting more analysis on these "decay channels," and as a result has boosted its certainty up to 5.9 sigma. Still, the particle may not be the exact Higgs boson theorists have always imagined; the researchers have been careful at all turns to call it only a "Higgs-like" particle until more analysis can be done. (More Higgs boson stories.)