Dr. Wefel noted, however, that according to most models, a pulsar could generate particles with even more energy, up to trillions of volts, whereas the bump in the ATIC data seems to fall off at around 800 billion electron volts.
When John Conway, a professor at the University of California, Davis, found a suspicious bump in the data he was analyzing last winter, "the hair literally rose up on the back of my neck," as he later wrote on the blog Cosmic Variance.
The researcher will see a bump in the data and think it's significant, but the next researcher to come along won't see it – because the bump was a statistical fluke.
But what if this latest bump in the data has solid foundations?
In January, Dr. Antimo Palano, a collaborator on the experiment from Bari University in Italy, was checking a decay process and saw a small bump in the data sample.
Last year, after running the contraption at its highest energy, a small bump in the data was detected, leading to speculation that a new sub-atomic particle might have been discovered.
Showing off one striking bump in the data, Fabiola Gianotti, a spokeswoman for the Atlas team, said, "If we are just being lucky, it will take a lot of data to kill it".
To qualify as a discovery, some bump in the data has to have less than one chance in 3.5 million of being an unlucky fluctuation in the background noise — what physicists call five-sigma.
A five sigma result means there is a one in 1,000,000 chance that a "bump" in the data (the possible signal of a new particle) is just a fluke.
Three sigma represents about one in 700 likelihood that a "bump" in the data is down to some statistical fluctuation, in the absence of a Higgs.
