The probability that last year's data identifying the Higgs boson was a statistical fluke—and that researchers hadn't discovered the long-sought particle—"is now becoming astronomically low," said Tim Barklow, an experimental physicist with the ATLAS Experiment who's based at Stanford University's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

On Thursday, scientists from CERN announced at the annual Moriond Conference in Italy that certain key properties of the particle are so far consistent with what is predicted by the so-called Standard Model of particle physics.

For example, the Higgs boson is postulated to have no rotation, or "spin," and in the Standard Model its parity—a measure of how the particle's mirror image behaves—should be positive.

And indeed, the latest data "point to the new particle