The subatomic neutral particle called neutrinos have beaten light or photon particles in a race, according to an experiment conducted by scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN.

Using a particle detector called the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus or OPERA, the speed of neutrino particles was measured from its launching at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland to its arrival at the underground facility of Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory.

The OPERA timed the travel speed at 2.43 milliseconds, shockingly 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light.
Light travels at a speed of approximately 186,282 miles per second. Renowned physicist Albert Einstein theorized that nothing in the universe can be faster than light. The speed of neutrinos, however, threatens to invalidate this theory, which is the foundation of modern physics.

The OPERA team expressed confidence on the result of the experiment. But its spokesman, Antonio Ereditato from the University of Bern, wanted peers to do the same tests to confirm their findings.

"Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral, rarely interact with other matter, and have a vanishingly small mass. But they are all around us-the sun produces so many neutrinos as a by-product of nuclear reactions that many billions pass through your eye every second," according to Scientific American.