Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider have been smashing protons together, on and off, since 2009. On Tuesday they announced that they\u2019d encountered a new particle as a result of all those subatomic crack-ups called the pentaquark\u201d\u201dand it could help explain what holds together other subatomic particles like protons and neutrons.<\/p>\n
Close followers of the saga responded to the news like hungry Star Wars fans to a new trailer, immediately formulating potential plotlines for the particle. Within 30 hours of the announcement, physicists began to submit their theories about the pentaquark to the online, pre-peer review science article repository arXiv. But assembling those papers is hard\u201d\u201dand these scientists didn\u2019t come up with their new theories overnight. How did they get it done so fast? As is wont to happen with any big reveal, somebody in the research team leaked the inside scoop.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite everyone\u2019s good intentions, rumors do spread,\u201d\u009d says Guy Wilkinson, the spokesperson for the LHCb (that stands for Large Hadron Collider Beauty experiment), the research team that found the particle in several years worth of data. The leak isn\u2019t surprising, considering the team consists of over 1,100 members from 16 different countries.<\/p>\n