What does a pentaquark mean for you?

Almost - but not quite - buried on the icy plains of Pluto this week, the Large Hadron Collider revealed a completely new type of particle. What does that tell us?

Perhaps the first thing it tells us is that scientists at CERN are more focused on their results than on the attendant publicity, whatever the press office might advise them. New Horizons has been on the way to Pluto for more than nine years, and the data in which the pentaquark was discovered were recorded by the LHCb experiment more than three years ago, so you might think they could have arranged things to avoid announcing the new particle on the same day as this. As a friend on the experiment put it, it "Shows how focussed we were on the science."

Related: Large Hadron Collider scientists discover new particles: pentaquarks