Closer than business as usual. The problem to get out of the current "long stasis" [1] is to find a new elementary particle or an experiment that can't be explained with the current elementary particles and can be refined to discover a new elementary particle.
They discover two new composite particles. There are hundred of composite particles, so it's somewhat business as usual. Anyway, most composite particles have 2 or 3 quarks, but the new particles have 4 or 5 quarks. So they are weird new composite particles.
Making calculations of particles made of a few quarks is very difficult, borderline impossible, so it's interesting to find new particles and verify that the current approximations for particles made of a few quarks are good enough or fix them.
Also, the approximations for particles made of a few quarks use virtual particles that appear and disappear. And some of these virtual particle may be a unknown new particle. So if the calculation is too wrong it may be an indirect way to discover a new elementary particle and escape the "long stasis". But I'd not be too optimistic about a groundbreaking discovery.
[1] I don't think it's a problem yet. The current "long stasis" it's overrated IMHO.
What makes these kind of particles interesting and "exotic" is that they are not the kind of particles the Standard Model was originally developed to describe. Those particles, mesons and baryons, consist of two and three quarks, respectively, with some quantum numbers that must obey certain rules for the particles to exist, and we have found that (almost?) all of the two and three quark combinations allowed by the rules are in fact observable as particles in experiments.
But those rules for the quantum numbers can also be fulfilled with certain combinations of four or five quarks, and there is nothing in the Standard Model that either forbids or requires these combinations to exist as real particles. So it was new information when the first resonances that could be interpreted as those kind of particles were discovered and it is interesting that there are more of these. But it is not unexpected, either, the earliest paper on pentaquarks cited on the wikipedia page is from 1987.
So it is indeed close to business as usual. It is interesting, and new, but is is still filling out the corners of the Standard Model.
They discover two new composite particles. There are hundred of composite particles, so it's somewhat business as usual. Anyway, most composite particles have 2 or 3 quarks, but the new particles have 4 or 5 quarks. So they are weird new composite particles.
Making calculations of particles made of a few quarks is very difficult, borderline impossible, so it's interesting to find new particles and verify that the current approximations for particles made of a few quarks are good enough or fix them.
Also, the approximations for particles made of a few quarks use virtual particles that appear and disappear. And some of these virtual particle may be a unknown new particle. So if the calculation is too wrong it may be an indirect way to discover a new elementary particle and escape the "long stasis". But I'd not be too optimistic about a groundbreaking discovery.
[1] I don't think it's a problem yet. The current "long stasis" it's overrated IMHO.