The Great Pyramids of Egypt have been around for something like 5,000 years now and they’ve been an endless object of human fascination, so you’d think that after generations and generations of life between then and now, we would have discovered pretty much everything there is to know about these ancient triangular structures.
But guess what? It turns out that we don’t! New research that was published in the Nature science journal reports that scientists have confirmed that there is a large empty space in Khufu’s pyramid.https://twitter.com/nytimesworld/status/926066874227548165
The team, led by Mehdi Tayoubi from the HIP Institute in France and Kunihiro Morishima from Nagoya University in Japan, determined there is a void in the pyramid that’s at least a hundred feet long. They did this by studying the density of and imaging the pyramid through the use of “muons,” which are byproducts of cosmic rays that are not totally absorbed by solid objects. It’s somewhat similar to how x-ray imaging works, in that it lets us see what’s inside a solid object.
Saying that this large empty space is a hidden chamber would only be speculation at this point, but Tayoubi and Morishima seem to believe that the void is “deliberate architectural feature of the pyramid.”
Learn more about this fascinating discovery here, and let us know in the comments below what you think might be in that chamber right now. Priceless ancient artifacts? Reanimated mummies waiting to terrorize unsuspecting intruders? Five thousand years of dirt and dust? Yes to all three, probably!
Featured image: Keith Yahl/Flickr
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