Higgs boson discovery still unconfirmed, but now more likely than ever

Eight months after announcing the discovery of a new particle “consistent with Higgs boson,“ scientists have announced that the particle is ”looking more and more like a Higgs boson.” In the months following last July’s announcement, the team at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has been able to analyze two and a half times more data than originally available, which has led Joe Incandela, a particle physicist and spokesperson for the project, to proclaim “it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is.”

In a press release accompanying today’s announcement, though, CERN said it’s not completely clear if the particle is the Higgs boson that confirms the Standard Model of particle physics, or the lightest of several bosons from other non-standard models. “Finding the answer to this question will take time.”