After years of searching, researchers say they’ve lastlyidentified a glueball — a particle made only of nuclear force. Hypothesized to exist as part of the standard model of particle physics, glueballs have stunned researchers since the 1970s as they can only be spotted indirectly by measuring their procedure of decay. Now, a group of particle scientists in Austria say they’ve found proof for the existence of glueballs by observing the decay of a particle identified as f0(1710). Protons and neutrons — the particles that everyday matter consist of — are made of tiny elementary particles called quarks, and quarks are seized together by even minor particles called gluons.