Higgs boson: Transformer space.com

Scientists may have observed the Higgs boson doing a new trick: creating pairs of muons.

When the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012, it was the final piece of Standard Model of particle physics puzzle, a particle that had been— long theorized to exist alongside quarks, electrons, neutrinos, muons, gluons, photons and the other known particles, but never before seen. Its role: the physical manifestation of the Higgs field, a feature of the universe that physicists believe endows particles with mass. Particles that wade through the field as if it were super-thick molasses, have greater mass than those that zip through more easily.