“It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model,” said researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

Scientists believe that the Higgs boson is the last discovered particle outlined by the Standard Model of particle physics, which explains the interaction of all subatomic particles. It is one of the fundamental theories of modern physics, which is why it is sometimes called “the theory of almost everything.”

More experiments and LHC data processing will follow to determine the full properties of the discovered particle, which is a daunting task considering that the detection of the boson is a very rare event – it takes around 1 trillion proton-proton collisions for each observed instance, according to CERN researchers.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest particle accelerator launched in 2008, was built with the prime goal of either finding the Higgs boson, whose existence was predicted by British physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s, or disproving it, possibly undermining the Standard Model.