Remnants of space dust that constantly showers the world are helping unlock the secrets of a 2,000-year-old Mexican pyramid where the rulers of a mysterious civilization may lie buried. Deep under the huge Pyramid of the Sun north of Mexico City, physicists are installing a device to detect muons, sub-atomic particles left over when cosmic rays hit Earth. The particles pass through solid objects, leaving tiny traces which the detector will measure, like an X-ray machine, in a search for burial chambers inside the monolith. Since there are fewer muons in an empty space than in solid rock or earth, scientists will be able to spot any holes inside the pyramid, a sacred site in the city of Teotihuacan, which rose and fell around the same time as ancient Rome. "If we detect an area where there is less density than expected, that gives us an indication that there is probably a hole there," said Arturo Menchaca, head of the National Autonomous University's physics institute. Archeologists would then likely tunnel into the pyramid in the hope of finding a burial chamber and solving the riddle of who ruled Teotihuacan, also home to the smaller Pyramid of the Moon and a huge temple to a fierce serpent god. Housing 150,000 people at its apogee, the city's influence reached hundreds of miles to modern day Guatemala but no one knows its true name or who its founders were.

The name Teotihuacan (The Place Where Men Become Gods) was given by awed Aztecs who inhabited the area 700 years after the city was abandoned around 600 AD. The Aztecs were stunned by the monumental buildings and precise city planning. A Nobel prize winning scientist, Luis Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley, used muon technology in a scan of the Khephren pyramid in Egypt in the 1960s. "Alvarez proved there were no hidden chambers in that pyramid and it is now in scientific literature," said Menchaca, dressed in a hard hat in a cave directly under the Pyramid of the Sun.

View: Full Article | Source: signonsandiego.com