CERN’s Large Hadron Collider-b (LHCb) experiment presented its latest discovery last week at a meeting of the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics.

Meet the double-charm tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered.

(In other words, quarks are smaller than small.) Protons and neutrons are both made up of three quarks, but the newly discovered hadron particle is made of four, making it a species of tetraquark.

This new tetraquark is made up of two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks, stuck together into one particle.

The new tetraquark is the first exotic hadron that’s “doubly charmed,” meaning its two charm quarks are present alongside antiquarks that aren’t charmed.

The 62 hadrons so far discovered at the Large Hadron Collider have basically been cajoled out of obscurity by the accelerator’s extreme physics and the vast team that labors over all the machinery and data.

“It shall be a breakthrough in particle physics, if the discovery of a new type of tetraquark with two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks is proved,” said Rui-Lin Zhu, a theoretical physicist at Nanjing Normal University in China, in an email.