Listed as the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World, the nearly 500-foot-tall Great Pyramid of Giza is estimated to have been built more than 4,500 years ago. For millennia, the ancient Egyptian pyramid has been the focus of experts and regular folk alike due to its inherently mysterious nature as well as a lack of knowledge and understanding of why such a massive and oddly shaped building was created in the first place.
Was it just a grand burial site for royalty, such as Pharoah Khufu (a.k.a. Cheops), or did it serve an entirely different purpose?
The mystery may be one step closer to being solved as scientists have recently said they’ve detected something extraordinary within the megalithic structure’s chambers: concentrated pockets of electromagnetic energy.
Researchers from ITMO University in St Petersburg, Russia stated they recreated an exact replica model of the Great Pyramid of Giza inside their laboratory to measure electromagnetic responses inside its various chambers, including down near the base.
Sky News reports:
“The model was used to see how wave energy is scattered or absorbed by the pyramid and the group tested the interactions with waves of resonant length – ranging from 200m to 600m.”
“If the pyramid’s ability to concentrate energy can be recreated on a nanoscale size, researchers say the same science could be used to create more efficient sensors and solar cells.”
A scientific article titled Electromagnetic properties of the Great Pyramid: First multipole resonances and energy concentration was published on July 20th, 2018 in the Journal of Applied Physics. The authors, Mikhail Balezin, Kseniia V. Baryshnikova and others, provided more details about their experiments and findings in the paper’s abstract:
“Resonant response of the Great Pyramid interacting with external electromagnetic waves of the radio frequency range (the wavelength range is 200–600 m) is theoretically investigated. With the help of numerical simulations and multipole decomposition, it is found that spectra of the extinction and scattering cross sections include resonant features associated with excitation of the Pyramid’s electromagnetic dipole and quadrupole moments. Electromagnetic field distributions inside the Pyramid at the resonant conditions are demonstrated and discussed for two cases, when the Pyramid is located in a homogeneous space or on a substrate. It is revealed that the Pyramid’s chambers can collect and concentrate electromagnetic energy for both surrounding conditions. In the case of the Pyramid on the substrate, at the shorter wavelengths, the electromagnetic energy accumulates in the chambers providing local spectral maxima for electric and magnetic fields. It is shown that basically the Pyramid scatters the electromagnetic waves and focuses them into the substrate region.”
In an online interview, ITMO’s project coordinator, Dr. Andrey Evlyukhin, discussed the reasoning behind further researching the pyramid (source: Sky News):
“Egyptian pyramids have always attracted great attention. We as scientists were interested in them as well, so we decided to look at the Great Pyramid as a particle dissipating radio waves resonantly. Due to the lack of information about the physical properties of the pyramid, we had to use some assumptions.”
“For example, we assumed that there are no unknown cavities inside and that the building material with the properties of an ordinary limestone is evenly distributed in and out of the pyramid. With these assumptions made, we obtained interesting results that can find important practical applications.”
Main Image Credit: Flickr