Party of Five! Physicists Discover Long-Sought 'Pentaquark' In Stroke of Luck

One week ago, an international team of scientists announced that they had discovered the pentaquark, an exotic, short-lived chunk of matter that had long eluded researchers. Its serendipitous discovery fills in one of the remaining gaps in the Standard Model, the prevailing but incomplete theory of particle physics, and it potentially points the way to weird "subatomic molecules" and other exotic forms of matter. While finding the particle hinged on a stroke of good fortune, the discovery marks ...