Scientists have found an extra charming new subatomic particle that they hope will help further explain a key force that binds matter together.

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced on Thursday the fleeting discovery of a long theorised but never-before-seen type of baryon.

Baryons are subatomic particles made up of quarks. Protons and neutrons are the most common baryons. Quarks are even smaller particles that come in six types, two common types that are light and four heavier types.

The high-speed collisions at the world's biggest atom smasher created for a fraction of a second a baryon particle called Xi cc, said Oxford physicist Guy Wilkinson, who is part of the experiment.

The particle has two heavy quarks — both of a type that are called "charm"— and a light one. In the natural world, baryons have at most one heavy quark.

It may have been brief, but in particle physics it lived for "an appreciably long time," he said.

The two heavy quarks are in a dance that's just like the interaction of a star system with two suns and the third lighter quark circles the dancing pair, Mr Wilkinson said.

"People have looked for it for a long time," Mr Wilkinson said. He said this opens up a whole new "family" of baryons for physicists to find and study.

"It gives us a very unique and interesting laboratory to give us an interesting new angle on the behavior of the strong interaction (between particles), which is one of the key forces in nature," Mr Wilkinson said.

Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider Show all 10 1 /10 Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider A scientist views the first collision pictures at Cern yesterday, where sub-atomic particles were smashed together at three times the previous energy record EPA Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider Two beams of protons began 10 days ago to speed at high energy in opposite directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva. Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, British Peter Higgs is seen inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel. Higgs is best known for his theory explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and the Higgs Boson in particular. It is anticipated that the LHC will determine the existence of the Higgs Boson. Getty Images Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider A model of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel is seen in the CERN (European Organization For Nuclear Research) visitors' centerin Geneva-Meyrin, Switzerland. CERN is building the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC is installed in a tunnel buried 50 - 150 m below ground. Getty Images Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider A woman passes behind a layers of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet (CMS), one of the experiments preparing to take data at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particule accelerator. Getty Images Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider A European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientist checks a monitor at the Alice experiment control room Getty Images Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider An engineer pointing to the magnet core of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet (CMS, Compact Muon Solenoid). Getty Images Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider Belgium's King Albert II (3rd R) visits the Large Hadron Collider of the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN (Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire) in Geneva. Getty Images Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider Technicians work at the building of the cap of the Large Hadron Collider. Some 2000 scientists from 155 institutes in 36 countries are working together to build the CMS particle detector. Getty Images Smashing! Atom record for Large Hadron Collider Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who is to become the director of CERN, with a giant photograph of the CMS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the "Weltmaschine "("World Machine") exhibition in Berlin, Germany. Getty Images

Chris Quigg, a theoretical physicist at the Fermilab near Chicago, who wasn't part of the discovery team, praised the discovery and said "it gives us a lot to think about."

The team has submitted a paper to the journal Physical Review Letters.

The Large Hadron Collider, located in a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN.