Amina Khan reports today in the LA Times on how a team of scientists
have discovered a hidden cavity within Egypt’s Great Pyramid.
What's more, they found it by using muons.
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Originally Posted by Amina Khan, LA Times
The mysterious cavity, described Thursday in the journal Nature, is at least 30 meters long. And though the researchers aren’t sure whether it’s straight or inclined, whether it’s one large space or a series of smaller ones, the discovery has already triggered interest among archaeologists as to the purpose of the void.
“What we are sure about is that this big void is there,” said Mehdi Tayoubi, president of the nonprofit Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute in Paris, which led the effort. ”But we need to understand [it] better.”
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Amina Khan, LA Times
For this project, a team of researchers attempted to boost their odds of success by adding muons to their scientific toolkit.
Muons are subatomic particles that are produced when cosmic rays — high-speed atom fragments that hurtle through space — smash into the atmosphere. They carpet-bomb Earth at a rate of 10,000 per square meter per minute.
These tiny particles can pass through hundreds of meters of rock before decaying or being absorbed. This turns out to be very handy for scientists who want to probe a pyramid somewhat in the way that doctors use X-rays to examine a bone inside your body.
This technique had been pioneered decades ago by Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez of UC Berkeley, who used muon tomography to probe the smaller Khafre pyramid nearby. He concluded that there were no large hidden voids within the structure.
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Article and video here :-
http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...htmlstory.html
Paper in Nature here :-
http://www.nature.com/articles/natur...ww.latimes.com
Discovery of big void in Great Pyramid using cosmic muons - Nature
