It has been said that scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) discovered a new type of particle which they called a pentaquark. Researchers said the discovery of this latest particle has solved a 50-year-old puzzle about the building blocks of matter.

Scientists hypothesized that a category of particles known as baryons that consists of neutrons and protons, are made up of three fractionally charged objects known as quarks whereas other particles known as mesons are made up of quark-antiquark pairs.

LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson said in a statement that the pentaquark is much more than just a new particle. He further said that studying the properties of the pentaquark can help them to better comprehend how the neutrons and protons from which all of us are made have been constituted.

LHCb physicist Tomasz Skwarnicki of Syracuse University said, “We have examined all possibilities… and conclude that (these patterns) can only be explained by pentaquark states”.

Scientists said that the quark model allows the existence of other quark composite states, such as pentaquarks composed of four quarks and an antiquark.

Scientists working on LHC had a more robust research about the presence of pentaquarks because the LHC has the capability to detect and identify all the final states of the particles after the collision, according to the Stone.

The group discovered the pentaquarks by examining the decay of a particular kind of baryon, known as Lambda b. The next step in the analysis will be to study how the quarks are bound together within the pentaquarks, said scientists.