A team of European physicists has a big part of the scientific world questioning one of the fundamental laws of physics and wondering whether they need to rethink the work of Albert Einstein.

The physicists recently discovered they could send a subatomic particle faster than the speed of light – something that no one thought could ever be done.

According to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity -- the one made famous by the equation E=mc2 -- it's not possible for anything to go faster than the speed of light. For Einstein, it was just a theory. Yet it has since been verified enough times for physicists to agree that the speed of light -- about 299,792 kilometres per second – must be the absolute speed limit in all the cosmos.

But on Thursday, researchers on a project called OPERA announced they had recorded sub-atomic particles called "neutrinos" travelling faster than light.

Over three years, they fired a neutrino beam from a particle accelerator at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) lab near Geneva to a lab in Italy. To their surprise, they discovered the neutrinos had travelled 60 nanoseconds -- sixty billionth of a second -- faster than the speed of light.

Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.

What's a neutrino?

They're odd bits of an atom that are produced through radioactive decay in the sun, for example, or in certain nuclear reactors.

They are so small, they weigh next-to-nothing. The fact they do carry a tiny, but measurable, mass had led scientists to assume they must move slower than light, which has no mass at rest. This discovery that that may not be true has left physicists confused.

The CERN scientists said their finding was made months ago, but given its significance, they checked and rechecked their work several times before announcing the results.

Not surprisingly perhaps, the claim is being greeted with skepticism both inside and outside CERN.

"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN said.

The lab researchers planned to detail their findings on Friday. And of course, they say they are planning more experiments to further test the findings.

Gillies told The Associated Press the readings have so astounded researchers that "they are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail."

Only two labs in the world are even capable of trying to replicate the results. One is Fermilab outside Chicago, and the other is a Japanese lab that's been out of commission since the March tsunami and earthquake.

Fermilab officials met Thursday about verifying the European study and said their particle beam is already up and running. The only trouble is that their measuring systems aren't nearly as precise as the Europeans' and won't be upgraded for a while, said Fermilab scientist Rob Plunkett.

Interestingly, a team at Fermilab had similar faster-than-light results in 2007. But that experiment had such a large margin of error that the scientific significance evaporated.

With reports from The Associated Press