Scientists announced Thursday that they have found a fundamental particle that has a larger mass than they thought.
The best theory scientists have to describe the most basic building blocks of the Universe is the Standard Model of particle physics.
One of the four fundamental forces of nature, the weak force, is a pillar of the Standard Model.
The most precise measurement ever made of the W Boson directly undermines the model.
Ashutosh Kotwal, a physicist at Duke University who led the study, told Agence France-Presse that the result took more than 400 scientists over 10 years to scrutinize four million W boson candidates.
The particles were smashed together at mind-bending speeds in the US state of Illinois.
It was the world's highest-energy particle accelerator until 2009, when it was replaced by the Large Hadron collider.
The scientists at the CDF have been crunching numbers since the Tevatron stopped running.
The chart shows the particles of the Standard Model. There is a science alert.
The Standard Model is probably the most successful scientific theory that has ever been written down, according to a particle physicist at Cambridge University.
He said that it can make very precise predictions. If the predictions are wrong, the model cannot be changed.
The whole thing comes crashing down if you pull on one part of it too much.
There are problems with the Standard Model.
It does not account for dark matter, which is thought to make up 95 percent of the Universe. It says that the universe should not have existed in the first place because the Big bang should have destroyed it.
Physicists said in a companion Science article that a few fissures have recently been exposed in the model.
In this framework of clues that there are missing pieces to the Standard Model, we have contributed one more very interesting and large clue.
Jan Stark, physicist and director of research at the French CNRS institute, said that this is either a major discovery or a problem in the analysis of data.
He told Agence France-Presse that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
The scientists at the CDF said they had determined the mass with a precision of less than one percent.
The gorilla's weight was compared to 40 grams of ounces.
The Standard Model predicted by seven standard deviations, which is also called sigma.
The chances of getting a five sigma result by dumb luck is one in three million, according to Cliff.
If this is real, and not some systematic bias or misunderstanding of how to do the calculations, it would be a huge deal because it would mean there is a new fundamental ingredient to our universe that we haven't discovered before.
If you want to convince people that we have broken the Standard Model of particle physics, you need more than one measurement.
David Toback said that it was up to the theoretical physics community and other experiments to follow up on this and shed light on the mystery.
After a decade of measuring, Kotwal isn't done yet.
We follow the clues and leave no stone unturned, so we can figure out what this means.
Agence France-Presse
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