In breaking the GZK speed limit, these particles challenged one of the farthest-reaching predictions ever made. Where had the Oh-My-God particle come from? How could it possibly exist? Did it really? The questions motivated astrophysicists to build bigger, more sophisticated detectors that have since recorded hundreds of thousands more “ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays” with energies above 1 EeV, including a few hundred “trans-GZK” events above the 60 EeV cutoff (though none reaching 320 EeV). “It’s like you’ve got a gorilla in your backyard throwing bowling balls at you, but he’s invisible,” Kieda said. When scientists looked in the direction from which the particle had come, they could see nothing of the kind. But an astrophysical accelerator of unimagined size and power would be required to produce such a particle. This “GZK cutoff” suggested that the Oh-My-God particle must have originated recently and nearby - probably within the local supercluster of galaxies. The particle had broken a cosmic speed limit worked out decades earlier by Kenneth Greisen, Georgiy Zatsepin and Vadim Kuzmin, who argued that any particle energized beyond approximately 60 EeV will interact with background radiation that pervades space, thereby quickly shedding energy and slowing down. The faintly glowing contrail of the Oh-My-God particle (as the computer programmer and Autodesk founder John Walker dubbed it in an early Web article) was spotted in the Fly’s Eye data the following summer and reported after the group spent an extra year convincing themselves the signal was real. “It was a pretty crude experiment,” said Kieda, who operated the Fly’s Eye with Luo and several others. As darkness fell on a clear and moonless night, Luo rolled the cans up toward the sky. Each of the mirrors was bolted inside a rotating “can” fashioned from a section of culvert, which faced downward during the day to keep the sun from blowing out its sensors. Earlier, at dusk, Mengzhi “Steven” Luo had switched on the computers for the Fly’s Eye detector, an array of dozens of spherical mirrors that dotted the barren ground outside. “Nobody ever thought you could concentrate so much energy into a single particle before,” said David Kieda, an astrophysicist at the University of Utah.įive or so miles from where it fell, a researcher worked his shift inside an old, rat-infested trailer parked atop a desert mountain. But bowling balls contain as many atoms as there are stars. Its energy equaled that of a bowling ball dropped on a toe. The particle was going so fast that in a yearlong race with light, it would have lost by mere thousandths of a hair. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.On the night of October 15, 1991, the “Oh-My-God” particle streaked across the Utah sky.Ī cosmic ray from space, it possessed 320 exa-electron volts (EeV) of energy, millions of times more than particles attain at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built by humans. “It’s not every day we discover a chamber in a pyramid.” “I’d love to be there when they first stick a camera through a drill hole,” Morris admitted. If confirmed, this would be the first newly rediscovered chamber within the Great Pyramid in more than a century. “What they’ve seen is fairly definitive,” he says, although it will take drilling and cameras to determine if the cavity is a structural chamber, or a void created by a long-forgotten collapse.Ī team led by Luis Alvarez first tried using muon radiography to map pyramids in 1970, but they were unable to detect new voids.
“It’s marvelous,” Morris says, noting that the long exposure times increase the robustness of the results. After several months in position to record muons, all three methods confirmed a void in the same location. Outside the pyramid, they also used detectors that record muons indirectly when the high-energy particles ionise the gas inside. Once their initial findings indicated a potential cavity, they confirmed it by placing an instrument that emits a flash of light when struck by muons within the pyramid. Like photographic film is exposed to light to make a photo, the emulsion reacts to muons and makes a record of their paths. The team used three different muon detectors, starting with nuclear emulsion film within the Queen’s chamber. The team believes it’s another oversized tunnel similar in dimensions to the Grand Gallery that is at least 30 metres long. This new void is approximately the same volume as the Grand Gallery.
They also detected a new large void above the Grand Gallery that connects the King and Queen’s chamber. The team mapped the pyramid’s three known chambers – the subterranean chamber, the Queen’s chamber, and the King’s chamber – along with connecting corridors.
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