Particles could reveal clues to how Egypt pyramid was built

FILE – This file Aug. 19, 2011 photo shows the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, about 25 miles south of Cairo, Egypt. (AP Photo/Coralie Carlson, File)

CAIRO — An international team of researchers said Sunday they will soon begin analyzing cosmic particles collected inside Egypt’s Bent Pyramid to search for clues as to how it was built and learn more about the 4,600-year-old structure.

Mehdi Tayoubi, president of the Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, said that plates planted inside the pyramid last month have collected data on radiographic particles known as muons that rain down from the earth’s atmosphere.

The particles pass through empty spaces but can be absorbed or deflected by harder surfaces. By studying particle accumulations, scientists may learn more about the construction of the pyramid, built by the Pharaoh Snefru.

“For the construction of the pyramids, there is no single theory that is 100 percent proven or checked; They are all theories and hypotheses,” said Hany Helal, the institute’s vice president.

“What we are trying to do with the new technology, we would like to either confirm or change or upgrade or modify the hypotheses that we have on how the pyramids were constructed,” he said.

The Bent Pyramid in Dahshur, just outside Cairo, is distinguished by the bent slope of its sides. It is believed to have been ancient Egypt’s first attempt to build a smooth-sided pyramid.

The Scan Pyramids project, which announced in November thermal anomalies in the 4,500 year-old Khufu Pyramid in Giza, is coupling thermal technology with muons analysis to try to unlock secrets to the construction of several ancient Egyptian pyramids.

Tayoubi said the group plans to start preparations for muons testing in a month in Khufu, the largest of the three Giza pyramids, which is known internationally as Cheops.

“Even if we find one square meter void somewhere, it will bring new questions and hypotheses and maybe it will help solve the definitive questions,” said Tayoubi.

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There’s a ninth planet out there – now we just need to find it

Mathematics suggests hidden gas giant in solar system

The truth is out there; way, way out there (source: CalTech/R.Hurt)

Pic Scientists at CalTech claim to have found proof that there is a ninth planet in the solar system, using computer modeling and historical astronomy data.

The new planet has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and has a very eccentric path around our Sun, making one complete orbit every 10,000 or 20,000 years and travelling 200 times further from the Sun than our orbit. The planet hasn’t been seen, but can be determined to exist based on its effect on objects in the Kuiper Belt that encircles our solar system.

“This would be a real ninth planet,” said Mike Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”

That’s true, thanks to our modern definition of what a planet is. We’ve known about all the planets as far out as Saturn since before telescopes, and the advent of optics led to the discovery of Uranus back in 1781.

The existence of Neptune, like the new ninth planet, was proved mathematically before it was identified in 1846 based on the erratic movement of Uranus. Pluto was also proved mathematically to exist but it was nearly 100 years later before it was confirmed, and then demoted to dwarf planet status in an infamous 2006 astronomers’ vote.

There’s no fear of that in the case of the new ninth planet – it’s massive enough to cause objects in the Kuiper Belt to move in such a predictable fashion that Brown and his associate Konstantin Batygin estimate there’s only a 0.07 per cent possibility that they are mistaken about its existence.

In a paper published in the latest issue of The Astronomical Journal, the duo detail how they came to find the planet when a student of Brown’s noticed that 13 large objects in the Kuiper Belt were behaving oddly, as though they were being influenced by a much larger body.

Brown and Batygin spent the next 18 months building up complex mathematical simulations of what could be causing the movement and running them through a computer model. Brown supplied the astronomical data and Batygin applied physics to see what could be going on.

“I would bring in some of these observational aspects; he would come back with arguments from theory, and we would push each other. I don’t think the discovery would have happened without that back and forth,” said Brown. “It was perhaps the most fun year of working on a problem in the solar system that I’ve ever had.”

At first the two considered that maybe other Kuiper Belt objects were causing the orbital anomalies, but the sums didn’t add up – the Belt would have had to have 100 times the mass we understand it has. So that left the influence of a planet, and one that was orbiting the Sun at right angles to the orbits of other planets.

“Your natural response is ‘This orbital geometry can’t be right. This can’t be stable over the long term because, after all, this would cause the planet and these objects to meet and eventually collide,'” said Batygin. “Still, I was very skeptical. I had never seen anything like this in celestial mechanics.”

In order for the theory to be accurate, there would have to be other Kuiper Belt objects on a similar 90-degree trajectory. After three years of looking, the two found four largish objects that did just that.

“We plotted up the positions of those objects and their orbits, and they matched the simulations exactly,” says Brown. “When we found that, my jaw sort of hit the floor.”

Planets are supposed to form from the disk of matter that surrounds a young star, but the unusual orbit suggests that while the ninth planet might have started that way, it got knocked out of alignment, possibly by a major object like Jupiter, and sent on a new orbital trajectory.

Despite orbiting so far away from the Sun, planet nine should still be visible using our most powerful telescopes, and may have been picked up on star surveys and not recognized for what it is. The hunt is now on to be the first to get a clear sighting.

“I would love to find it,” says Brown. “But I’d also be perfectly happy if someone else found it. That is why we’re publishing this paper. We hope that other people are going to get inspired and start searching.”

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Astronomers may have found most powerful supernova

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• “This may be the most powerful supernova ever seen by anybody,” Ohio State University professor says

An international team of astronomers may have discovered the biggest and brightest supernova ever.

The explosion was 570 billion times brighter than the sun and 20 times brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined, according to a statement from The Ohio State University, which is leading the study. Scientists are straining to define its strength.

“This may be the most powerful supernova ever seen by anybody … it’s really pushing the envelope on what is possible,” study co-author Krzysztof Stanek, an astronomer at Ohio State, was quoted as saying in The Los Angeles Times.

The team of astronomers released their findings this week in the journal Science. The explosion and a gas cloud that resulted are called ASASSN-15lh after the team of astronomers, All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, that discovered it last June.

A supernova is a rare and often dramatic phenomenon that involves the explosion of most of the material within a star. Supernovas can be very bright for a short time and usually release huge amounts of energy.

Searching for the power source

This blast created a massive ball of hot gas that the astronomers are studying through telescopes around the world, Ohio State said. It cannot be seen with the naked eye because it is 3.8 billion light years from Earth.

There’s an object about 10 miles across in the middle of the ball of gas that astronomers are trying to define.

“The honest answer is at this point that we do not know what could be the power source for ASASSN-15lh,” said Subo Dong, lead author of the Science paper, according to Ohio State. He is a Youth Qianren Research Professor of astronomy at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University.

Todd Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, said the object in the center may be a rare type of star called a millisecond magnetar. Spawned by a supernova, it’s a rapidly spinning, dense star with a powerful magnetic field.

Could it be a ‘supermassive black hole’?

To achieve the brightness recorded, the magnetar would have to spin 1,000 times a second and “convert all that rotational energy to light with nearly 100% efficiency,” Thompson said, according to the Ohio State press release. “It would be the most extreme example of a magnetar that scientists believe to be physically possible.”

The question of whether a suprnova truly caused the space explosion may be settled later this year with help from the Hubble Space Telescope, which will allow astronomers to see the host galaxy surrounding the object in center of the ball of gas, Ohio State said.

If it’s not a magnetar, it may be unusual nuclear activity around “a supermassive black hole,” Ohio State said.

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