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upstart writes:

The corridor is 30 feet long and likely slopes upward. Where it leads is still a mystery.

In 2016, scientists using muon imaging picked up signals indicating a hidden corridor behind the famous chevron blocks on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The following year, the same team detected a mysterious void in another area of the pyramid, believing it could be a hidden chamber. Two independent teams of researchers, using two different muon imaging methods, have now successfully mapped out the corridor for the first time, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former antiquities minister, called it "the most important discovery of the 21st century." [So far - Ed]

As we've reported previously, there is a long history of using muons to image archaeological structures, a process made easier because cosmic rays provide a steady supply of these particles. An engineer named E.P. George used them to make measurements of an Australian tunnel in the 1950s. But Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez really put muon imaging on the map when he teamed up with Egyptian archaeologists to use the technique to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Although it worked in principle, they didn't find any hidden chambers.

There are many variations of muon imaging, but they all typically involve gas-filled chambers. As muons zip through the gas, they collide with the gas particles and emit a telltale flash of light, which is recorded by the detector, allowing scientists to calculate the particle's energy and trajectory. It's similar to X-ray imaging or ground-penetrating radar, except with naturally occurring high-energy muons rather than X-rays or radio waves. That higher energy makes it possible to image thick, dense substances like the stones used to build pyramids. The denser the imaged object, the more muons are blocked, casting a telltale shadow. Hidden chambers in a pyramid would show up in the final image because they blocked fewer particles.

[...] For this latest work, one team used muon radiography to map the shape and location of the secret corridor, placing detectors at various points around the pyramid. Specifically, they used nuclear emulsion films (supplied by colleagues at Nagoya University in Japan), which can detect particles without an electric power supply. Those multi-point observations enabled them to determine the location, inclination, and vertical layout of the corridor.

A second team deployed three gaseous detectors, or muon telescopes, outside the pyramid, supplied by the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy (CEA) at Durham University in the UK. These are less compact than the emulsion films and require a power source, but the detectors produce results much faster. The telescopes gathered about 140 days' worth of solid data, collecting over 116 million muons.

The results of the two independent analyses confirmed the presence of a corridor-like void. The corridor is about 9 meters long (29.5 feet), with a transverse section of 2×2 meters (6.5×6.5 feet), and most likely slopes upward, although where it leads remains a mystery.

DOI: Nature Communications, 2023. 10.1038/s41467-023-36351-0.

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