This particle was called the Higgs boson. In 2012, a subatomic particle with the expected properties was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at theLarge Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. How long did the Higgs boson take?
and therefore how much Higgs boson eating/spitting gets done. Massive things like protons and neutrons really disturb the Higgs field a lot, and therefore are involved in a lot of particle exchange. Massless things, like photons, don't bother...