Egypt's Pyramids of Giza

An ultra-powerful scan of Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza could help identify two mysterious spaces that potentially house the legendary tomb of the pharaoh. The watershed study was published last month in arXiv by University of Cornell archaeologists.

“We plan to field a telescope system that has upwards of 100 times the sensitivity of the equipment that has recently been used at the Great Pyramid,” wrote the researchers of the proposed scan, which is titled “The Exploring the Great Pyramid Mission.” They use advanced cosmic ray technology to map the internal structure of the Great Pyramid, which is Egypt’s largest pyramid and the last surviving wonder from antiquity.

The team’s research is based on a study by Scan Pyramid group, which conducted a series of scans between 2015 and 2017 that analyzed muons — cosmic particles that regularly fall on Earth — to detect any voids, Live Science reported. Muons react differently to air and stone and are therefore ideal for mapping air pockets in stone structures such as pyramids.

The scientists found two spaces, the larger of which measures 98 feet long and 20 feet high and sits above the grand gallery. Meanwhile, the smaller void is located near the citadel’s north face.

And while neither void’s function is clear, scientists speculate that the large one could lead to the secret burial chamber of the pharaoh Khufu (reign circa 2551 B.C. to 2528 B.C.), for whom the Great Pyramid was originally constructed in the 26th century B.C.

In order to peer inside the void, researchers plan to scan the area with supercharged cosmic ray muons, which are 100 times more powerful than the ones used in the prior scan.

Utilizing them will allow researchers to “image muons from nearly all angles and will, for the first time, produce a true tomographic image [three-dimensional internal images created by analyzing waves of energy] of such a large structure,” per the study.  READ MORE...