Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), world’s most powerful particle collider, recently announced that they have discovered a new particle called the pentaquark.

The new particle was first discovered in 1960s, but much like the Higgs boson particle the pentaquark eluded science for decades until its detection at the LHC.

The discovery was made by the Hadron Collider's LHC experiment. Scientists at the LHC presented their findings to the journal Physical Review Letters.

It has been said that two physicists Murray Gell Mann and George Zweig in 1964 independently proposed the existence of the subatomic particles known as quarks.

The physicists theorized that key properties of particles known as baryons and mesons were best explained if they were in turn made up of other constituent particles.

Zweig coined the term ‘aces’ for the three new hypothesized building blocks, but it was Gell-Mann's name ‘quark’ that stuck.

The new model allowed for other quark states, such as the pentaquark. Several teams in mid-2000s claimed that their discoveries were subsequently undermined by other experiments.

Patrick Koppenburg, physics co-coordinator for LHCb at Cern, said, “There is quite a history with pentaquarks, which is also why we were very careful in putting this paper forward”.

Physicists studied the way a sub-atomic particle called Lambda b decayed transformed into three other particles inside LHCb.

LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson said in a statement that the pentaquark is not just any new particle; it represents a way to aggregate quarks, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches.