The much-ballyhooed discovery of the elusive Higgs boson– or “God” particle — may have been an illusion. At least that’s what some scientists are claiming.

Scientists were excited last year after the massive CERN partical accelerator in Europe — called the Large Hadron Collider — allowed researchers to observe the Higgs boson for the first time, or so they thought. But a new study suggests that the data collected by the LHC may have actually been dealing with a different type of subatomic particle, according to UPI.

Particle physicist Mads Toudal Frandsen said in a recent press release that it is true that the data does indicate the Higgs particle, but “there can be other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles.”

Frandsen and other scientists from the University of Southern Denmark questioned the conclusion that Higgs had been observed in a paper published in the journal Physical Review D.

The data may actually deal with what is known as the “techni-higgs,” a theoretical type of particle. This particle, unlike Higgs-Boson, is not an elementary particle, but rather consists of elementary techni-quarks. Techni-quarks bind together and can form techni-higgs particules, while other combinations can form dark matter.

Frandsen wants a new round of experiments using the CERN LHC to ensure that scientists really have found the Higgs boson. By giving it a more powerful accelerator, scientists could observe techni-quarks directly.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, and was built by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) between 1998 and 2008. Scientists use it to test predictions in particle physics, with the discovery of the Higgs boson the crown jewel of their efforts. The LHC exists in a tunnel that is 17 miles in circumference and 175 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is important because it is an elementary particle in the standard model of particle physics. It is the smallest possible excitation of the Higgs field, a field which explains why some particles have mass while some are massless. Scientists have been search for the particle for 40 years.