According to N + 1 , an international team of researchers confirmed the presence of a hidden camera in the pyramid of Cheops. It is located above the Grand Gallery and reaches a length of about 30 meters. The article was published in the journal Nature.
The pyramid of Cheops was created approximately 4,5 thousand years ago during the reign of the IV ancient Egyptian dynasty. It was built by the order of Pharaoh Khufu, better known as Cheops. For a long time the pyramid remained the highest building in the world - its height reaches 139 meters, and the width at the base - 250 meters.
Despite the fact that this is one of the largest and oldest historical monuments on Earth, there is still no consensus on how it was built.
ScanPyramid, 2017
Inside the Cheops pyramid, to date, there are three burial chambers - the unfinished funeral pit, the Tsar's Chamber, where an empty granite sarcophagus is located, and the Queen's Chamber. To the pharaoh's cell is the Grand Gallery - a high inclined tunnel 46.6 meters long.
Last year, archaeologists also said that they managed to find two voids - one of them is above the Grand Gallery, and the other, called the Northern Corridor, is located above the modern entrance to the pyramid. However, some scientists expressed doubts about the reliability of the find, believing that some parts of the pyramid could have been made from another type of stone.
Participants in the ScanPyramids project, who discovered voids, continued their study to confirm the discovery.They reported on the results in a new article. The researchers conducted three independent experiments based on the muon tomography method. Muons are unstable elementary particles that are produced when cosmic rays collide with the nuclei of atoms and the subsequent decay of mesons.
The flow of muons is able to penetrate the walls of buildings - however, air retains less muons than, for example, concrete blocks. If we place near the construction of a muon detector that will register the number and trajectory of the particles, then in fact we will get the "X-ray" of its internal device. Read more about the muon tomography, as well as its use, you can in our material "Fallen from Heaven".
In the first experiment, the researchers used a nuclear photographic emulsion to capture muons. Detectors were installed in 2015 in the south-western corner of the "Chamber of the Queen" and the adjacent corridor. The results of the scattering muon radiography showed that above the Grand Gallery there is a 30-meter camera.
ScanPyramid, 2017
The second experiment using scintillator hodoscopes (KEK), which was conducted already in 2016 and 2017, confirmed the results of the first group of researchers. The third team of scientists received a signal with a reliability of 5.8 sigma - that is, the probability that the physicists made a mistake is extremely small (less than a percent).
The center of the camera is located at an altitude of 40-50 meters above the floor of the "Chamber of the Queen", along the length of the "great emptiness", as the authors of the article call it, is comparable to the Grand Gallery.
Researchers do not know the exact characteristics of the camera - it can be an inclined corridor or a room consisting of several rooms. Future research will help to find out.