Scientists have announced that a fundamental particle, the W boson, has a significantly greater mass than theorised, shaking the foundations of our understanding of how the universe works.
The best theory scientists have to describe the most basic building blocks of the universe is the standard model of particle physics.
The weak force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature and is a pillar of the standard model.
According to a new study, the most precise measurement ever of the W Boson directly contradicts the rules of the standard model.
Ashutosh Kotwal, a physicist at Duke University who led the study, said that it took more than 400 scientists over 10 years to record and analyse the data.
The particles were smashed together at mind-bending speeds to study them, and they were made by the Tevatron collider in the US state of Illinois.
It was the world's highest-energy particle collider 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 standard model is probably the most successful theory and scientific theory that has ever been written down, according to Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at Cambridge University.
If those predictions were proved wrong, it could not be changed.
The whole thing comes crashing down if you pull on one part too much.
The standard model has some problems. It doesn't account for dark matter, which is thought to make up 95 percent of the universe.
Physicists said in a companion Science article that a few fissures have recently been exposed in the standard 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, predicting heated discussions in the years to come.
He said that extraordinary claims require 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 predicts by seven standard deviations, which are also called sigma.
The chances of getting a five sigma result by dumb luck is one in three-and-a-half million.
It would be a huge deal if this is true, and not some systematic bias or misunderstanding of how to do the calculations, because it would mean there is a new fundamental ingredient to our universe.
He said that if you break the standard model of particle physics, there are new particles out there that you can convince people of.
David Toback said that it was up to the theoretical physics community and other experiments to follow up on this.
Kotwal isn't done yet after a decade of measurement.
We follow the clues and leave no stone unturned, so we can figure out what this means.
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