A video accidentally published on the CERN website appears to leak the long-awaited discovery of the Higgs boson that is rumored to be officially announced early tomorrow morning.

“We’ve observed a new particle. We have quite strong evidence that there’s something there. Its properties are still going to take us a little bit of time,” Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS experiment, one of the main Higgs-searching experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, said in the video. “We think this is pretty darned significant.”

Incandela stops short of calling the new particle the Higgs in the video, saying the results are preliminary. And a CERN press officer told the Telegraph that the video is merely one of several videos made for different possible outcomes in preparation for their big announcement, scheduled for 12 a.m. PDT tomorrow morning. The video has since been removed from the website.

But the buzz surrounding the announcement, coupled with Fermilab announcing its final Higgs search results from the Tevatron yesterday, the fact that six physicists who theorized about the Higgs particle back in the 1960s – including the particle’s namesake, Peter Higgs — were invited by CERN to attend the announcement, and now the leaked video, strongly suggest that the Higgs discovery is finally about to be unveiled.

If the particle Incandela mentions is indeed the Higgs boson, physicists will be most excited to learn if its properties are those predicted under the Standard Model, or if they indicates the presence of new physics. Regardless of what it is, the finding seems to have physicists all fired up.

“I think this video is very exciting, though we’ll get more details when the data comes out,” said theoretical physicist Mark Wise from Caltech.

The Higgs boson has been theorized since the 1960s and has been searched for at both the LHC and its U.S. rival, the Tevatron. It is the final piece of the Standard Model of physics, which describes the interactions of all subatomic particles and forces, and is required to give all other particles their mass.

“The discovery of the Higgs will start a new era of exploration into understanding all its properties,” wrote physicist Ashutosh Kotwal, who helps lead the Higgs analysis at the LHC’s other experiment, ATLAS, in an e-mail to Wired. “We are entering a very interesting time in fundamental physics, and we are starting to unravel a deep mystery of nature.”

Watch the CERN announcement here on Wired.com starting at 11 p.m. PDT tonight.

Physicist Aidan Randle-Conde from Southern Methodist University will be live-blogging the announcement with commentary for those in need of help following the convoluted jargon. He will also be giving a post-talk wrap-up with physicist Stephen Sekula.

Video: CERN