Archeologists to scan the Great Pyramid of Giza with cosmic rays

Humans have built many structures, but the Great Pyramid of Giza might be the most famous. Archaeological icons are a testament to the greatness and persistence of ancient civilizations. The Great Pyramid is alone. The Great Pyramid is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu will be scanned with Cosmic-ray muons by a team of scientists. They want to map the Great Pyramid's internal structure. Explore the Great Pyramid is a mission.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in the 26th century BC. Cheops is the name of the tomb of the Pharoah Khufu. It was built with about 2.3 million blocks of stone and weighed in at about 6 million tons. It was the tallest structure in the world for over 3,800 years. The underlying structure of the Great Pyramid is what we see now. Over time, the smooth white limestone was removed.

Archaeologists have mapped out the interior of the Great Pyramid over the years. There are different chambers and passageways under the pyramid. The pyramid's center has a chamber in it.

High-tech methods have been used to probe the insides of the pyramids more rigorously. The pyramid was scanned with muon tomography in the late 1960s. In 1969 they found no new chambers after examining a small portion of the pyramid.

The Great Pyramid was studied by the ScanPyramids team. They used muon tomography along with other tools. The biggest discovery is a huge void above the Grand Gallery. The discovery was published in the journal Nature and is considered one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the year.

Muons are more massive than electrons. They are used in tomography because they penetrate deep into structures. Even X-rays can be more deep than that.

air shower. An air shower is a cascade of secondary decay particles, including muons, indicated with the symbol (?). Credit: SyntaxError55 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13361920">

air shower. An air shower is a cascade of secondary decay particles, including muons, indicated with the symbol (?). Credit: SyntaxError55 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13361920">

Cosmic ray muons are created when high-energy particles slam into Earth. Cosmic rays are high-energy protons and atomic nuclei that stream into Earth from outside the Solar System. Secondary particles are produced when these particles collide with Earth. There are particles that are muons.

Muons can decay in a few microseconds or millionths of a second. They travel at a light speed and can penetrate deep before they decay. Cosmic rays bombard Earth and there is an endless source of muons. Measure the muons effectively is the task of muon tomography.

There are different uses for muon tomography, like examining shipping containers. Recent technological innovations in muon tomography lead to new applications. Scientists in Italy will use muon tomography to image the inside of Mount Vesuvius, hoping to understand when it might erupt again.

The Explore the Great Pyramid mission uses muon tomography to take the next step. Like ScanPyramids before them, EGP will use muon tomography to image the structure. The muon telescope system will be 100 times more powerful than the equipment used at the Great Pyramid.

The Great Pyramid will be used to move large telescope sensors. The shipping containers will be temperature controlled to make it easy to assemble the detectors. Each unit will be 12 m long, 2.4 m wide, and 2.9 m tall. Two muon telescopes were used in their simulations.

There are five critical points.

• Produce a detailed analysis of the entire internal structure which does not just differentiate between stone and air, but can measure variations in density.
• Answer questions regarding construction techniques by being able to see relatively small structural discontinuities.
• The large size of the telescope system yields not only the increased resolution, but enables fast collection of the data, which minimizes the required viewing time at the site. The EGP team anticipates a two-year viewing time.
• The telescope is very modular in nature. This makes it very easy to reconfigure and deploy at another site for future studies.
• From a technical perspective, the system being proposed uses technology that has been largely engineered and tested and presents a low risk approach.

Prototypes of the telescope are being built and the data-handling techniques they will use are still being determined. They are doing simulations and other work to prepare for the mission along the way. How they corral all those muons into a tomographic image is a critical piece.

The team is satisfied with their new approach and confident in the work they have done so far. The Great Pyramid will be created for the first time with a tomographic image, rather than a 2d image.

The Exploring the Great Pyramid Mission takes a different approach to image large structures. The use of large muon telescopes outside the Great Pyramid of Khufu can produce high resolution images due to the large number of detected muons. By moving the telescopes around the base of the pyramid, true tomographic image reconstruction can be performed for the first time.

Data simulations have been most of the work so far. Prototyping of specific components has already begun, and they will not be starting from scratch when they build the telescope.

It was a big deal when ScanPyramids discovered the Big Void. It caused a lot of controversy. Egyptologist Zahi Hawass disagreed with the findings. He told the New York Times that the paper didn't offer anything to Egyptology. Zero.

The discovery was embraced by most Egyptologists. Physicists supported the discovery. The scientists have seen the void using three different muon detectors in three independent experiments, which makes their finding very robust, according to Particle physicist Lee Thompson.

When scientists use modern high-energy physics to probe one of humanity's most ancient archaeological treasures, there will be some drama. Some Egyptologists might view physicists as interlopers. Physicists use mysterious particles from outer space to open the veil on our past.

They will have to get used to it.

More information: Tomographic Muon Imaging of the Great Pyramid of Giza. doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.08184 Kunihiro Morishima et al, Discovery of a big void in Khufu's Pyramid by observation of cosmic-ray muons, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature24647 Journal information: Nature , Science Citation: Archeologists to scan the Great Pyramid of Giza with cosmic rays (2022, March 1) retrieved 1 March 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-03-archeologists-scan-great-pyramid-giza.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.