It was announced this week that physicists are now "99 percent sure that they have discovered the crucial subatomic particle know as Higgs boson according to Reuters.

If they have in fact discovered the long-sought Higgs boson, they would be closer to understanding how the universe works at the elementary particle level.

Click here to read more about the Higgs boson particle discovery.

"The preliminary results with the full set of 2012 data are magnificent, and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, although we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CMS spokesman Joe Incandela according to Reuters.

The announcement was made after physicists thoroughly examined the latest findings from "huge volumes" worth of data collected over the last three years. The discovery would no doubt be one of the top contenders for the Nobel Prize.

A Higgs boson particle was predicted all the way back in 1964 to help people understand the creation of the universe, which a lot of people believe occurred during the explosion now known as the Big Bang.

The particle itself was named for Peter Higgs, one of the first physicists who proposed the idea, which later became known as the "God particle" according to the Associated Press.

The results were formally revealed in a press-statement by the Geneva-based CERN and released at a physics conference in the Italian Alps.

Click here to find out what comes next according to the Associated Press.

The statement followed a presentation of the latest discoveries by CMS, one of two teams currently working on Higgs.

The CERN statement indicated that while they are 99 percent sure they've made the discovery, they still have to establish whether the boson is a simple Higgs that would fill the last piece of the 30-year-old Standard Model explanation for how the universe works or if it is "something more exotic."

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