In 2015, the journal Nature published a shocking study related to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Using a series of measurements with cosmic ray detectors, three groups of scientists in France and Japan discovered a mysterious void inside the pyramid.
It was identified as a 30 meter long, 6 meter high room located directly above the Grand Exhibition Hall. Not a single entrance has been found that leads to this mysterious room. Therefore, scientists cannot know what is in it.
Some theories suggest that it is a mysterious room containing treasure. And because there is no path to it, this treasure has been preserved intact through millennia of raging grave robbers.
In 2017, a new study in the journal Nature continued to use cosmic ray detectors and found a second mysterious room in the Great Pyramid of Giza. This room is located right next to the room discovered in 2015 and also has no entrance.
The mysterious chambers are the largest pyramid discovery made since the Middle Ages, scientists say. Previously, it was thought that Khufu pyramid was explored to every corner, because it was the largest pyramid in Egypt, so it also attracted the most archaeological groups.
But now, it turns out that’s not really the case.
The Pyramid of Khufu, also known as the Great Pyramid of Giza, was built around 2560 BC to ensure the pharaoh’s immortality after his death.
In ancient Egyptian history, Khufu was not only an ordinary pharaoh, he was also exalted as a god. So the pyramid for Khufu was built to become the largest pyramid in Egypt.
It was built from limestone and granite blocks and stood at 139 meters tall and held the record for being the tallest structure in the world for 3,800 years, before the British completed the construction of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1314.
The pyramid complex at Giza, in which, the largest pyramid belongs to Pharaoh Khufu.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is currently the only surviving wonder of the ancient world. But despite that, scientists today still do not know how the Egyptians built this pyramid?
Along with that are countless mysteries inside these super-giant structures, but the two empty rooms inside the Great Pyramid of Giza continue to represent what is still waiting for us to discover.
Cosmic rays reveal rooms with no entrance in the pyramid
To understand how cosmic rays helped archaeologists scan the pyramids, think back to the last time you went to the hospital for an X-ray. Electromagnetic radiation, or specifically X-rays with short wavelengths, will have enough energy to penetrate the soft tissues of your body.
But X-rays will be blocked by denser parts, specifically here, bone. So bone will show up on the X-ray as a transparent or white space, while soft tissues will appear black.
Essentially, an X-ray is where you’re catching the shadow of X-rays going through your body. The x-ray film will tell you which is bone (blocks X-rays) and soft tissue (let X-rays pass through).
The cosmic ray pyramid technique also works on the same principle, to distinguish between solid rock and a void inside:
Because scientists could not build a giant X-ray machine to put the pyramids there, they took advantage of the source of cosmic rays that were shooting down on Earth, catching the shadow of these rays to Capture the stone blocks inside the pyramid.
Kyle Cranmer, a particle physicist at New York University, explains: Cosmic rays are energy-carrying particle waves that have arisen from massive events in the universe, such as when stars explode.
These events shoot atomic nuclei across the universe at nearly the speed of light. When these high-energy particles reach Earth, they plunge into our atmosphere like shotgun bullets and “hit the nuclei of other atoms that are already present in the atmosphere.
When atomic nuclei from space collide with those atoms in our atmosphere at speeds close to the speed of light, they explode, ejecting subatomic particles such as electrons, positrons, and positrons. , neutrinos, muons, etc
This is exactly what scientists are trying to recreate inside particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The problem is that some subatomic particles have very short lifetimes. They just burst apart for milliseconds, then reabsorbed into other large particles right in the atmosphere.
Only the muon – a heavier version of the electron – is heavy and stable enough to remain viable until it reaches the ground. Those muons hit Earth at 98% of the speed of light – so fast that they go through the time of expansion according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
In theory, the muon would decay in just 2 microseconds, with a speed close to the speed of light, it would only penetrate 600 meters into the atmosphere. But by the time it takes for the muon to expand, its 2 microseconds corresponds to tens of seconds in the Earth’s environment.
This allows the muon to live long enough for human devices to pick up. “Right now, those muons are going through our bodies. Every second, you’re still catching thousands of muons piercing through your body.“, Cranmer said.
And they also pierced through every other terrestrial object, including the pyramids. Along the way, muons will also be absorbed by dense materials such as rocks. The empty spaces allow the muons to fly through.
By placing muon detectors inside and at the base of the pyramid, the researchers created countless negative images of the pyramid’s interior. The data from each of these images are then combined from each angle to create a map that depicts its interior voids.
And a map scientists built with the Great Pyramid of Giza revealed two previously unexplored voids, just above the pyramid’s Great Hall and next to the body chamber. marinated pharaoh Khufu.
In contrast, an exploratory scan of the pyramid of Bent, a smaller pyramid in Egypt, did not show it to have any undiscovered mysterious voids.
What mystery awaits us in those rooms?
It is necessary to reiterate the fact that there is no path leading to two mysterious new chambers found inside the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Since Egypt does not allow destructive impacts on the pyramid, there is currently no way to open a passage to it. Therefore, the discovery of two empty chambers is now raising more questions than it answers.
An interesting theory is that these two chambers are where the treasures of the pyramid are stored. And since there’s no way to get there, these treasures will endure through continuous raids and looting for millennia.
Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist at the University of Bristol, UK, speculates the chambers could also function as a sort of “depressurization chamber”. Since they are above the Grand Pavilion, a space instead of stone blocks helps to reduce the weight placed on the structure below, making the Grand Hall ceiling less heavy.
If so, the two rooms should essentially be completely empty and contain no treasures at all.
A third theory put forward by Jean-Pierre, a French architect, is that the rooms were part of a giant system of counterbalance, which the ancient Egyptians used to build metal. pyramid.
A counterweight room allowed them to install overhead rock crane systems. And since the two newly discovered empty chambers are taller than the king’s, they may have been used to house the roof, placing the stone blocks atop the pyramid.
So which hypothesis is correct? We don’t know yet. Only one thing is certain, to solve those mysteries, scientists will have to make more investigations using cosmic rays. It’s still the most modern tool we have at the moment, to peer inside huge structures without having to destroy it.
A team of scientists recently proposed a plan to rescan the Great Pyramid of Giza with cosmic rays – this time with a higher resolution and powerful muon analysis system.
“We plan to deploy a telescope system that is 100 times more sensitive than the one recently used at the Great Pyramid.“, they wrote in the pre-published paper published on the arXiv server.
“Since the detectors we propose are very large, they cannot be placed inside the pyramid. So our approach is to put them outside and move them along the base. This way , we can collect muons from all angles to build the necessary data models.”
“The use of super-large muon telescope placed outside [Đại Kim tự tháp] could produce images of much higher resolution, based on the large number of muons detected.”
Alan Bross, a scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who represents the research team, said that at this resolution, they were able to even see artifacts inside the two empty chambers of the needle. pyramid.
If so, whether it is a treasure room or not will be clarified. High-resolution imaging will also help test Dodson and Jean-Pierre’s hypotheses.
Currently, the research plan of Bross and his colleagues has been approved by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. They are conducting financial work to prepare for their plan.
“We are looking for sponsors for the whole project“, Bross said.Once we have enough funding, we expect it will take about two more years to build the detectors.”
Then, the telescopes and muon collectors will be run for 2-3 years to collect enough data. So, the mystery of the empty rooms inside the Great Pyramid of Giza will persist for at least another five years – before new data reveals what it really is and what’s in those two rooms?
Refer to Livescience, Nature, Vox