Higgs boson found, Physicists who last summer triumphantly announced the discovery of a new particle but held back from saying what it was, declared on Thursday there was now little doubt it was the long-sought Higgs boson. Latest analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, where the boson was spotted as a bump on a graph early in 2012, "strongly indicates" it is the Higgs, said CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Physicists believe the boson and its linked energy field were vital in the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago by bringing flying particles together to make stars, planets and eventually humans - giving mass to matter, in the scientific jargon. The particle and the field, named for British physicist Peter Higgs who predicted their existence 50 years ago, are also the last major missing elements in what scientists call the Standard Model of how the cosmos works at the very basic level.