Scientists said Wednesday, July 4 that they had discovered a new particle whose characteristics match those of the Higgs boson, the most sought-after particle in physics, which could help unlock some of the universe's deepest secrets, CNN reports.

"We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," said Rolf Heuer, the director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which has been carrying out experiments in search of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator.

"The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe," Heuer said.

The particle has been so difficult to pin down that the physicist Leon Lederman reportedly wanted to call his book "The Goddamn Particle." But he truncated that epithet to "The God Particle," which may have helped elevate the particle's allure in popular culture.

Announcements by scientists about their analysis of data generated by trillions of particle collisions in the LHC, which is located beneath the Alps, drew avid applause at an eagerly awaited seminar in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday.

Finding the Higgs boson would help explain the origin of mass, one of the open questions in physicists' current understanding of the way the universe works.

The researchers stressed the preliminary nature of the results they were announcing Wednesday.

"A more complete picture of today's observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data," the nuclear research organization, known as CERN, said in its statement.

But despite the words of caution, the scientists' mood and many of their comments were brimming with enthusiasm about the potential scope of what they had discovered.

"It's hard not to get excited by these results," said Sergio Bertolucci, the research director at CERN.

The announcements by the CERN researchers come two days after scientists in Illinois said they had crept closer to proving the existence of the Higgs boson but had been unable to reach a definitive conclusion.