Physicists in Italy said Wednesday they're extremely close to concluding whether or not they discovered the Higgs boson last year, the infamous God particle.

In July 2012, scientists with the world's largest atom smasher, the $10 billion Lagre Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, said they located a particle described as Higgs-like but couldn't say for sure whether it was definitively the particle. However, thousands of further checks show that they are even closer to confirmation.

CBS News reported that the scientists must rule out one last possibility that it's something different. The long-time theorized subatomic particle would give an explanation as to why matter has mass and has been coined the missing cornerstone of physics.

With a newer diagnosis, scientists are now even closer to being 100 percent certain that they found the Higgs boson, said Pauline Gagnon, a physicist with the European Center for Nuclear Research.

"It looks more and more like a Higgs boson," Gagnon said Wednesday, in an update given at a conference in the Italian Alps.

Gagnon compared the finding of the Higgs to the identification of a specific person. She said there's only one other thing the particle could be: a graviton.

By evaluating the spin of the particle, scientists will be able to tell if it's either a graviton or a Higgs boson, with the latter being far more likely. If it has no internal spin, it's the Higgs boson; if it has a lot of spin, it's the graviton.

Without the Higgs boson to explain why matter and electrons have mass, "there would be no atoms, there would be no chemistry, there would be no life, so that's kind of important," said Sean Carroll, physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

View the video below to learn more about the Higgs boson.