A new heavy cousin of the proton was found hiding in a pile of data at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.
![While a mighty new particle accelerator is starting up in Europe, Fermilab’s Tevatron, outside Chicago, still has a few cards up its sleeve. Physicists working at the DZero detector (hosted in the facility on the top right, along the accelerator’s 6.3-kilometer ring in the background) announced the discovery of a new particle called the omega-b-minus.](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/8668.jpg?resize=300%2C196&ssl=1)
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The new particle, long predicted to exist, is made of a bottom quark — the second-heaviest of all quarks — and two, much lighter strange quarks essentially orbiting around it, says Fermilab physicist Dmitri Denisov. The laboratory announced the discovery on September 3 and submitted a paper for publication to Physical Review Letters.
The particle, known as omega-b-minus (Ωb–), is one of many possible combinations of quarks predicted by the standard model of particle physics, the accepted foundation of the subject. The 1964 discovery of a particle made of three strange quarks was the landmark that established the mathematical basis for what would later be the theory of quarks, says Michael Peskin, a theoretical physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif. “This much later discovery is just another feather in the cap of this excellent theory,” he says.