After high-tech, make way for a simple camera at the end of a navel. Researchers studying the Pyramid of Cheops do everything they can to try to discover new structures within it. Evidenced by the simultaneous release on Thursday of the first images of a corridor discovered in 2016 above the north entrance of the building and two scientific studies presenting data collected with particle detectors, radar and ultrasound that had made this possible March 2 to refine the description of the cavity.
The images show a tunnel about 9 meters long, surmounted by a chevron ceiling a few meters above the entrance that now allows tourists access, on the north face of the pyramid erected there, which is 4500 years old. They were disseminated by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, which since 2015 has been coordinating the ScanPyramids project, led by the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University and the HIP Institute (Heritage Innovation Preservation), a French association.
The original idea was to subject the Great Pyramid to a kind of giant X-ray beam using muon detectors. These particles, some of which are created by collisions of cosmic rays with Earth’s upper atmosphere, have the ability to be very penetrating. The principle of muography is therefore to compare the flux of muons in the atmosphere and what remains of them after passing through matter, in order to study them and find any cavities there.
An Atomic Energy Commission muon sensor that contributed to the discovery of the corridor on the north side of the Pyramid of Cheops. SCAN PYRAMIDS
The idea is not new, because the American Luis Walter Alvarez, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics, implemented it in the pyramid of Kephren in the late 1970s, and it quickly bore fruit in the pyramid of Cheops after the tunnel was discovered in 2016 by one Nagoya University team specializing in volcanic research. The following year, with the strengthening of Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) detectors, a larger structure about a hundred feet long was identified at the heart of the pyramid, dubbed the “Big Void.”
Read our archive (2017): Pyramid of Cheops: Discovery of a large unknown cavity at the heart of the building
The French and Japanese jointly publish the results of data collection up to 2020 on the small tunnel in Nature Communications on Thursday 2 March. “We have improved our instruments to miniaturize them and reduce the use of argon, a gas that could cause anoxia in a confined environment such as the corridors of the pyramid,” says prosecutor Sébastien (Institute for the study of the fundamental laws of l’ Univers, CEA, Paris-Saclay University) who coordinated the study with Kunihiro Morishima (Nagoya University).
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