Higgs boson could explain facets of dark energy

One of the biggest mysteries in physics is why a mysterious substance called “dark energy,” found to dominate the energy count in the universe, has a smaller value than it’s supposed to have. Scientists estimate that value as one-followed-by-120-zeros times smaller than would be expected based on fundamental physics. The puzzle is often called the cosmological constant problem. Now, two physicists suggest that the recently discovered Higgs boson—an entity considered responsible for giving objects their mass, so they can weigh something — is also behind the cosmological constant problem.