Scientists have discovered a secret room inside the Cheops pyramid. Scientists have discovered a secret room inside the Cheops pyramid. A mysterious cavity has been found in the Cheops pyramid.

MOSCOW, November 2 – RIA Novosti. Physicists have found a previously unknown void area in the Cheops pyramid that may be a secret tomb or a passage into it, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

“When we saw this area of emptiness, we realized that we had come across something very interesting and big, we abandoned all other projects and concentrated on studying this area, located directly above the corridor to the tomb of Cheops. Now we are sure that it really exists, and this "This is the first discovery of its kind in the Cheops pyramid since the Middle Ages, when it was opened by Caliph Al-Mamun in the 9th century," said Mehdi Tayoubi from the HIP Institute in Paris (France).

Physicists have found two “unknown voids” in the Cheops pyramidArchaeologists and physicists have discovered two, as they put it, “previously unknown voids” inside the Cheops pyramid, which may be secret rooms where the remains of Pharaoh Khufu rest.

Secrets of the Pharaohs

The Pyramid of Cheops, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was built in the middle of the third millennium BC, during the time of Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops), a representative of the fourth dynasty of the Old Kingdom, at the same time as all the “great pyramids” of Ancient Egypt. This structure, 145 meters high and 230 meters wide and long, remains one of the tallest and largest buildings ever created by mankind.

Over the past two centuries, scientists have discovered three rooms in the pyramid, in one of which the pharaoh himself was supposedly buried, in the other his wife, and the third was considered a bait or trap for robbers. In the walls of the corridors that lead to Khufu's tomb, unusual channels and structures were found, which scientists believe are elements of the “security system” that protected the pharaoh from defilers.

The mummies of the pharaoh and his wife were never discovered, which is why many archaeologists believe that in fact their tombs are still hidden in the thickness of the pyramid. Two years ago, scientists from the universities of Nagoya, Paris and Cairo began searching for these secret rooms, studying the pyramid using cosmic particle detectors and telescopes as part of the ScanPyramids project.

Breath of space

Every second, millions of muons are formed in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere - charged particles resulting from the collision of cosmic rays with gas molecules in the air. These collisions accelerate muons to near-light speeds, thanks to which they penetrate tens and hundreds of meters deep into the surface of the planet. Scientists' measurements show that every square meter of the Earth's surface absorbs about 10 thousand of these particles.

French archaeologists and physicists, together with Japanese scientists, have adapted telescopes that can “see” muons to search for voids and hidden rooms in ancient architectural monuments.

This technique works very simply - the flux of muons decreases in the air and in empty space much more slowly than when passing through rock or earth, which makes it possible to search for secret rooms by bursts in the muon background.

In October last year, participants in the ScanPyramids project announced a sensational discovery - they managed to find several previously unknown voids in the pyramid, which could be the secret tombs of the “lord of two houses” and his wife. This discovery caused sharp rejection among archaeologists and Egyptologists, who accused physicists of incorrectly interpreting the data obtained.

Physics and lyrics

These accusations forced scientists to take repeated measurements using three different muon telescopes. This time, as Tayoubi emphasized, the observations were carried out according to the same rules and principles by which the Higgs boson and other particles unknown to science were searched for at the LHC and other accelerators.

“Our measurements absolutely rule out that this void area could have arisen due to differences in the properties of the stones or due to errors in construction,” says Zahi Hawass. Voids of this size and configuration could not have appeared between the blocks by chance, neither with engineering nor any other technology. "The Egyptians were too good builders to screw up the pyramid, leave a hole in it and create a room or corridor somewhere else," said Hany Helal of Cairo University.

Checking whether this is true or not, scientists installed a set of films sensitive to the action of muons in the supposed tomb of Cheops’s wife, and placed semiconductor particle detectors at the bottom of the pyramid. After a few months, they collected the data, processed it and compared it with how muons should move through the pyramid if there were no other voids in it, except for the already known corridors and rooms.

If the initial results of scanning the Cheops pyramid were erroneous, then, as Elal notes, the “pictures” obtained by different muon telescopes would not match. In fact, they turned out to be the same, which confirmed the assumptions of physicists and refuted the insinuations of archaeologists.

The images showed that above the main corridor of the pyramid there is a zone of emptiness thirty meters long, eight meters high and about two meters wide. As Tayubi noted, it can be either a solid corridor running parallel to the ground, up or down, or a suite of rooms. So far, physicists do not have enough data to rule out the first or second option.

Scientists emphasize that they are not interpreting their discovery in any way and do not claim that they managed to find a secret room - this task, according to them, should be carried out by Egyptologists.

Jean-Baptiste Mouret, a physicist at the University of Paris, hopes his team's discovery will convince Egyptian historians that they were wrong in their assessments and will open the door to debate whether it is worth trying to penetrate this void zone. if yes, how to do it.

A new round of history

In the near future, as scientists noted, they plan to continue studying the void zone, as well as other sections of the Cheops pyramid, including the tomb of the pharaoh himself, and will begin to scan other pyramids that may hide secret rooms and unknown voids.

These data, physicists hope, will help us understand exactly how the pyramids were built and whether we can trust the descriptions of their construction, which have come down to our time in the works of Herodotus.

At the same time, as scientists noted, muon scanners can not reveal all the secrets of ancient history. For example, according to Tayubi, they cannot be used to search for the secret tomb of Nefertiti in the tomb of Tutankhamun, the existence of which was recently announced by the famous British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves.

“Muon scanners cannot be used to study the tomb of Tutankhamun and other burials in the Valley of the Kings for the reason that we do not know how the voids are distributed in the rocks located above them,” the scientist explained, answering a question from RIA Novosti.

Such research, added Sebastien Procureur, a colleague of Moret, is further complicated by the fact that man-made particle accelerators cannot be used to scan pyramids and other ancient buildings, since delivering them to Giza or the Valley of the Kings would entail unacceptably high costs.

“In short, this is simply not feasible. Muons cannot be created directly - they arise from the decays of kaons and pions, and there are too few particle accelerators in the world capable of accelerating them to the required speeds. In addition, they are all very large - at least 700 meters in length. It would be easier for us to transport the pyramid to such an installation than to try to build it in Giza or other parts of Egypt. Therefore, we have to rely on space in such observations,” the agency’s interlocutor concluded.

Scientists have discovered a long, hidden, narrow void in the Great Pyramid that could finally reveal the secrets of a 4,500-year-old wonder of the world. The latest technology has been used to investigate the mystery, and we are once again getting closer to solving the mystery of the Great Pyramid!

The Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for thousands of years. The Pyramid of Khufu is the only Wonder of the World that has survived to this day. Scientists around the world have been trying to solve the mystery of the pyramid for hundreds of years, and now this has become possible thanks to the latest technologies.

Scientists have made a grand discovery using particles that penetrate rock. Detectors installed throughout the pyramid, including the Royal Chamber. discovered an empty space called the ScanPyramids Big Void.

"The ScanPyramids Big Void is not a room or a chamber—we don't know whether it's horizontal or vertical, whether it's made of one or more sequential structures, but it's big," says author Mehdi Tayoubi, president and co-founder of the HIP Institute

The find is located above the Great Gallery, which connects two chambers of the pyramid. Although the exact name is not known, this is the biggest discovery since the 19th century.

The space may be on a slope, meaning it could have been used to transport huge blocks to the center of the pyramid, experts say.

Three methods were used for the study:
1. Infrared thermography
2. 3D scanning using lasers.
3. Cosmic ray detectors.
It was cosmic ray detectors that helped obtain an overall picture of the mysterious cavity

Muons are created when the atmosphere reacts with cosmic rays, creating a stream of particles, some of which decay into muons. Elementary particles, which weigh 200 times more than electrons, can very easily pass through any structure, even large and thick rocks such as mountains
Researchers from the scientific committee of the Ministry of Ancient Egyptians suggest that this may be a "construction gap" - part of a trench that allowed workers to access the Grand Gallery and the Royal Chamber while the rest of the pyramid was built.

This find may finally explain how this pyramid was built. Scientists are confident that modern particle physics can shed light on the archaeological heritage of the world

After examining the pyramid, scientists, using computer technology, tried to recreate the appearance of this room.

Japanese physicists have discovered a giant cavity in the Cheops pyramid using muon scanning. They talked about the discovery in the magazine Nature .

The Pyramid of Cheops was built about 4,500 years ago and is the largest of the Egyptian pyramids. Its height is 139 m. Unlike most pyramids of that time, which were built over tombs, the Cheops pyramid contains several rooms. The Pharaoh's Chambers, the Queen's Chambers and the Great Gallery were discovered in the 9th century and studied in detail in the 19th century.

However, the question of whether there are other rooms in the pyramid and whether the tomb of the pharaoh is located in one of them still occupies scientists and enthusiasts.

Nature/nature.com

The scan was carried out as part of the project ScanPyramids, launched in October 2015. The goal of the scientists was to discover rooms inside the pyramids of Cheops and Khafre in Giza, as well as the Bent and Pink pyramids in Dahshur. The project uses infrared thermography, muon radiography and 3D reconstruction.

Cosmic rays coming from the Sun and from outside the solar system are mostly made up of protons. When a high-energy particle enters the Earth's atmosphere, it produces a flurry of particles, mostly pions and muons, which themselves produce other particles. Negatively charged muons appear for millionths of a second, moving at almost the speed of light and causing no harm to objects on the surface of the Earth.

So, according to statistics, several hundred muons fly through a person’s head per minute.

However, when flying through dense objects, muons lose part of their energy, so with the help of special sensors, physicists have already learned to find secret voids behind stone walls, inside volcanoes, in the Mayan and Egyptian pyramids.

“If you're looking for voids, you need to look for an excess of muons in a certain direction,” explains Arturo Menhaza-Roja, a physicist at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City who uses the method to study the Mexican pyramids. -

"Tracking muons allows us to localize and estimate the shape of cavities."

“The beautiful thing is that muons lose enough energy to be detected, but not so much that they are completely absorbed by the target. “This is truly a fabulous gift from nature,” adds particle physicist Roy Schwitters of the University of Austin, who was not involved in the project. “Scientists really have found a gold mine.”

Japanese physicists from Nagoya University placed muon detectors in the Queen's chambers - the stone absorbs these particles, and if there is a cavity near the sensor, it will pick up more muons. Two more groups of researchers joined in checking the data obtained.

All three teams agreed that the results indicated the presence of a large room above the Grand Gallery.

ScanPyramids

The length of the discovered cavity is 30 meters. It can be located either parallel to the ground or at an angle, the researchers note. It may actually be divided into several smaller rooms. The purpose of the room is not yet known, but its size indicates that it clearly played a significant role in the tomb of the pharaoh.

“The chances of discovering a secret tomb are zero,”

- says Egyptologist Aidan Dodson. However, experts hope that the find will allow us to learn much more about how the pyramid was built.

Perhaps, Dodson suggests, the ancient Egyptian builders wanted to reduce the load of masonry on the ceiling of the Great Gallery with the help of the room. Similar solutions were used, for example, in the pyramid of Pharaoh Snefru, the father of Cheops.

But geologist and engineer Colin Reeder believes that the new room was too far from the Great Gallery to have such a purpose.

According to his assumption, it can lead to another room, just as the Great Gallery leads to the chambers of the Pharaoh.

A third theory is put forward by Egyptologist Bob Brier. He had previously suggested that the Great Gallery was part of the counterweight system used by the pyramid builders to move granite blocks when building the Pharaoh's chambers. It is quite possible that the new premises had a similar purpose, he believes.

Researchers discovered two previously unknown voids in the Cheops pyramid. One of them is located in the northern part of the pyramid, the other in the northeast. Both resemble corridors. It is not yet possible to say whether they are related.