The largest of the two voids recently shown is situated just on top of the grand gallery, a passageway leading to what may be known as the "chamber of the pharaoh Khufu," and is approximately 98 feet in length and 20 feet in height, as specified in previous pyramid scans.
Live Science reported that a new extremely powerful scan of the Great Pyramid of Giza with the use of cosmic rays could show the identities of the two mysterious voids inside.
New cosmic-ray scan of the Great Pyramid of Giza could reveal hidden burial chamber https://t.co/B5G1ciWZCo
— Live Science (@LiveScience) March 14, 2022
Archeologists are unsure as to what they are to find in the void, which could be one huge area and several rooms. They are also hoping to discover the function of that void. The most fascinating probability is that the opening is the hidden burial chamber of Khufu. A more mundane probability is that the cavity played a certain role in the building of the pyramid.
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A camel trainer rides a camel near the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Pyramid of Khafra at the Giza Pyramids Necropolis on the western outskirts of the Egyptian capital's twin city of Giza.
The Biggest Pyramid in Ancient Egypt
The previous scans also showed a second, a much tinier void, just outside the north face of the pyramid. However, its purpose is not clear, as well.
Built on the pharaoh Khufu, the Great Pyramid of Giza, as described in a National Geographic report, is the biggest pyramid ever in prehistoric Egypt and is the lone surviving wonder of the ancient world.
Between 2015 and 2017, the project called "Scan Pyramids" ran a set of scans that examined muons, cosmic particles regularly falling on Earth, to find any voids. Such scans showed both of the voids in 2017. Now, researchers are planning to scan the Great Pyramid again, this time with a more powerful system that will examine muons in greater detail.
Muons
Muons are negatively charged elementary particles that form when cosmic rays collide with atoms in the atmosphere of Earth. These high-energy particles continuously rain down on this planet.
Since they are behaving differently when interacting with, for instance, stone versus air, researchers can utilize ultra-sensitive detectors to pinpoint the particles, as well as the map sites they cannot physically explore as with the Great Pyramid.
The researchers wrote in their preprint research published on the arXiv preprint server, they're planning to field a telescope system with upwards of 100 times the sensitivity of the equipment that has recently been utilized at the Great Pyramid. Studies published in preprint servers have yet to be reviewed by other researchers in the field.
Detectors that Cannot be Placed Inside the Pyramid
The scientists also wrote that because the detectors that are proposed are very large, they cannot be placed inside the pyramid, and thus, their method is to put them beyond and move them along the base.
In this manner, they added, they can collect muons from all angles in order to collect the needed data set. The use of extremely large muon telescopes placed beyond the Great Pyramid can produce higher resolution images because of the huge number of detected muons. Furthermore, the detectors are very sensitive, the study authors pointed out, they might even reveal the existence of artifacts within the voids.
According to scientist Alan Bross, from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, who's also co-author of the paper, if "a few m3 is filled with material" like metals, stone, wood, or pottery, "We should be able to distinguish that from the air."
Related information about the Great Pyramid of Giza is shown on ANR News's YouTube video below:
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