ATLAS and CMS experiments shed light on Higgs properties

Three years after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle, the so-called Higgs boson, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations present for the first time combined measurements of many of its properties, at the third annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP 2015). By combining their analyses of the data collected in 2011 and 2012, ATLAS and CMS draw the sharpest picture yet of this novel boson. The new results provide in particular the best precision on its production and decay and on how it interacts with other particles. All of the measured properties are in agreement with the predictions of the Standard Model and will become the reference for new analyses in the coming months, enabling the search for new physics phenomena. This follows the best measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson, published in May 2015 after a combined analysis by the two collaborations.

"The Higgs boson is a fantastic new tool to test the Standard Model of particle physics and study the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles," said CERN1 Director General Rolf Heuer. "There is much benefit in combining the results of large experiments to reach the high precision needed for the next breakthrough in our field. By doing so, we achieve what for a single experiment, would have meant running for at least 2 more years."

There are different ways to produce a Higgs boson, and different ways for a Higgs boson to decay to other particles. For example, according to the Standard Model, the theory that describes best forces and particles, when a Higgs boson is produced, it should decay immediately in about 58% of cases into a bottom quark and a bottom antiquark. By combining their results, ATLAS and CMS determined with the best precision to date the rates of the most common decays.

Such precision measurements of decay rates are crucially important as they are directly linked to the strength of the interaction of the Higgs particle with other elementary particles, as well as to their masses. Therefore, the study of its decays is essential in determining the nature of the discovered boson. Any deviation in the measured rates compared to those predicted by the Standard Model would bring into question the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism and possibly open the door to new physics beyond the Standard Model.

"This is a big step forward, both for the mechanics of the combinations and in our measurement precision, " said ATLAS Spokesperson Dave Charlton. "As an example, from the combined results the decay of the Higgs boson to tau particles is now observed with more than 5 sigma significance, which was not possible from CMS or ATLAS alone."

"Combining results from two large experiments was a real challenge as such analysis involves over 4200 parameters that represent systematic uncertainties," said CMS Spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi. "With such a result and the flow of new data at the new energy level at the LHC, we are in a good position to look at the Higgs boson from every possible angle."

Read more at Science Daily

Predator Numbers Don't Always Increase with Prey

Scientists said this week they have uncovered what seems to be an unusual law of nature that keeps big predator numbers low across vast spaces of the Earth and its oceans.

Even when there are plenty of prey around for larger creatures like lions to eat, the number of lions in an area does not increase, said the findings in the journal Science.

The same pattern holds just as true for big animals as it does for tiny sea creatures like zooplankton, which eat phytoplankton.

"Where prey are abundant, there are not proportionally more predators," said the study, which analyzed data going back 50 years on plants and animals across 2,260 ecosystems in 1,512 distinct locations worldwide, including grasslands, lakes, forests and oceans.

Rather than predators rising in number to match the available prey, predator populations are limited by the rate at which prey reproduce.

And in crowded settings, prey reproduced less than they did in settings where there were fewer prey around, suggesting that competition for resources may be working to limit prey offspring.

"Until now, the assumption has been that when there is a lot more prey, you'd expect correspondingly more predators," said study author Ian Hatton, a doctoral student at McGill University.

"But as we looked at the numbers, we discovered instead, that in the lushest ecosystems, no matter where they are in the world, the ratio of predators to their prey is greatly reduced," Hatton said.

"This is because with greater crowding, prey species have fewer offspring for every individual. In effect, the prey's rates of reproduction are limited, which limits the abundance of predators."

Co-author Kevin McCann, of Guelph University's department of integrated biology, said researchers were "astonished" by what they viewed as an "amazing pattern."

The relative amounts of predator and prey biomass in diverse ecosystems could be "remarkably well-predicted by a simple mathematical function called a power scaling law," said McCann.

This "power law" shows there are always fewer top predators than expected in resource-rich ecosystems than in resource-poor ecosystems.

Read more at Discovery News

Solar water-splitting technology developed

Rice University researchers have demonstrated an efficient new way to capture the energy from sunlight and convert it into clean, renewable energy by splitting water molecules.

The technology, which is described online in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, relies on a configuration of light-activated gold nanoparticles that harvest sunlight and transfer solar energy to highly excited electrons, which scientists sometimes refer to as "hot electrons."

"Hot electrons have the potential to drive very useful chemical reactions, but they decay very rapidly, and people have struggled to harness their energy," said lead researcher Isabell Thomann, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and of chemistry and materials science and nanoengineering at Rice. "For example, most of the energy losses in today's best photovoltaic solar panels are the result of hot electrons that cool within a few trillionths of a second and release their energy as wasted heat."

Capturing these high-energy electrons before they cool could allow solar-energy providers to significantly increase their solar-to-electric power-conversion efficiencies and meet a national goal of reducing the cost of solar electricity.

In the light-activated nanoparticles studied by Thomann and colleagues at Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP), light is captured and converted into plasmons, waves of electrons that flow like a fluid across the metal surface of the nanoparticles. Plasmons are high-energy states that are short-lived, but researchers at Rice and elsewhere have found ways to capture plasmonic energy and convert it into useful heat or light. Plasmonic nanoparticles also offer one of the most promising means of harnessing the power of hot electrons, and LANP researchers have made progress toward that goal in several recent studies.

Thomann and her team, graduate students Hossein Robatjazi, Shah Mohammad Bahauddin and Chloe Doiron, created a system that uses the energy from hot electrons to split molecules of water into oxygen and hydrogen. That's important because oxygen and hydrogen are the feedstocks for fuel cells, electrochemical devices that produce electricity cleanly and efficiently.

To use the hot electrons, Thomann's team first had to find a way to separate them from their corresponding "electron holes," the low-energy states that the hot electrons vacated when they received their plasmonic jolt of energy. One reason hot electrons are so short-lived is that they have a strong tendency to release their newfound energy and revert to their low-energy state. The only way to avoid this is to engineer a system where the hot electrons and electron holes are rapidly separated from one another. The standard way for electrical engineers to do this is to drive the hot electrons over an energy barrier that acts like a one-way valve. Thomann said this approach has inherent inefficiencies, but it is attractive to engineers because it uses well-understood technology called Schottky barriers, a tried-and-true component of electrical engineering.

"Because of the inherent inefficiencies, we wanted to find a new approach to the problem," Thomann said. "We took an unconventional approach: Rather than driving off the hot electrons, we designed a system to carry away the electron holes. In effect, our setup acts like a sieve or a membrane. The holes can pass through, but the hot electrons cannot, so they are left available on the surface of the plasmonic nanoparticles."

The setup features three layers of materials. The bottom layer is a thin sheet of shiny aluminum. This layer is covered with a thin coating of transparent nickel-oxide, and scattered atop this is a collection of plasmonic gold nanoparticles -- puck-shaped disks about 10 to 30 nanometers in diameter.

Read more at Science Daily

Hubble survey unlocks clues to star birth in neighboring galaxy

In a survey of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope images of 2,753 young, blue star clusters in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy (M31), astronomers have found that M31 and our own galaxy have a similar percentage of newborn stars based on mass.

By nailing down what percentage of stars have a particular mass within a cluster, or the Initial Mass Function (IMF), scientists can better interpret the light from distant galaxies and understand the formation history of stars in our universe.

The intensive survey, assembled from 414 Hubble mosaic photographs of M31, was a unique collaboration between astronomers and "citizen scientists," volunteers who provided invaluable help in analyzing the mountain of data from Hubble.

"Given the sheer volume of Hubble images, our study of the IMF would not have been possible without the help of citizen scientists," said Daniel Weisz of the University of Washington in Seattle. Weisz is lead author on a paper that appeared in the June 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Measuring the IMF was the primary driver behind Hubble's ambitious panoramic survey of our neighboring galaxy, called the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program. Nearly 8,000 images of 117 million stars in the galaxy's disk were obtained from viewing Andromeda in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths.

Stars are born when a giant cloud of molecular hydrogen, dust, and trace elements collapses. The cloud fragments into small knots of material that each precipitate hundreds of stars. The stars are not all created equally: their masses can range from 1/12th to a couple hundred times the mass of our sun.

Prior to Hubble's landmark survey of the star-filled disk of M31, astronomers only had IMF measurements made in the local stellar neighborhood within our own galaxy. But Hubble's bird's-eye view of M31 allowed astronomers to compare the IMF among a larger-than-ever sampling of star clusters that are all at approximately the same distance from Earth, 2.5 million light-years. The survey is diverse because the clusters are scattered across the galaxy; they vary in mass by factors of 10, and they range in age from 4 million to 24 million years old.

To the researchers' surprise, the IMF was very similar among all the clusters surveyed. Nature apparently cooks up stars like batches of cookies, with a consistent distribution from massive blue supergiant stars to small red dwarf stars. "It's hard to imagine that the IMF is so uniform across our neighboring galaxy given the complex physics of star formation," Weisz said.

Curiously, the brightest and most massive stars in these clusters are 25 percent less abundant than predicted by previous research. Astronomers use the light from these brightest stars to weigh distant star clusters and galaxies and to measure how rapidly the clusters are forming stars. This result suggests that mass estimates using previous work were too low because they assumed that there were too few faint, low-mass stars forming along with the bright, massive stars.

This evidence also implies that the early universe did not have as many heavy elements for making planets, because there would be fewer supernovae from massive stars to manufacture heavy elements for planet building. It is critical to know the star-formation rate in the early universe -- about 10 billion years ago -- because that was the time when most of the universe's stars formed.

Read more at Science Daily

Kestrel Mummy Hints at Raptor Breeding in Ancient Egypt

The last meal of a mummified kestrel has much to tell scientists about how the ancient Egyptians handled raptors, and why so many mummies of the birds of prey have been found.

So suggests a study just published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, which presents 3D imaging evidence and analysis of a European kestrel (Falco tinnunculus) mummy.

Researchers from the American University in Cairo, Stellenbosch University and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies say the bird died from being forced to eat too much: Its stomach contained evidence of a house mouse on which the bird had likely choked to death.

The raptor also appeared to have eaten another mouse on the same day, and parts of a small sparrow were also found. And, the scientists wrote, "there is no indication that it was deliberately killed as there is no clear separation of, or broken, vertebrae."

The researchers say the evidence of such force feeding points to a raptor breeding program, one that gave the Egyptians a steady supply of the animals to offer up to the sun god Re, with which raptors were closely identified in ancient Egypt

"The idea of birds of prey being bred to the extent of being kept and force-fed is new," said Salima Ikram, in a press release.

"Until now," said Ikram, professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and lead author of the study, "the sheer number of raptor mummies had been a mystery. Did they catch or trap them and kill them, raid nests, or find them dead? Our results explain why they had so many: We now think it was because of active breeding."

What isn't new is the idea of animal mummies. They were commonly used in religious ceremonies from around 600 B.C. to 250 A.D., the researchers write, and many such offerings have been recovered.

Egyptians typically gutted ceremonial animals prior to mummification, but this bird, supplied by South Africa's Iziko Museums, had not received that treatment. That left its last meal available for examination.

Read more at Discovery News

Summer Sea Ice Likely to Drop to 4th Lowest on Record

The shell of ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is nearing its yearly low point and projections suggest that it will be among the four lowest summer minimums on record. If melt rates are speedy enough, there’s a chance it could even take the number two spot, forecasters said Wednesday, as the ice continues its decades-long, warming-driven decline.

The sea ice that caps the Arctic Ocean naturally waxes and wanes with the seasons, reaching its maximum area at the end of winter, before the reemergence of the sun in spring starts off the melt season. Sea ice area, or extent, usually hits its annual minimum in mid- to late-September.

The warming of the planet from the human-driven accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is acting over this cycle, leading to overall declines in sea ice, with a particularly pronounced drop-off in summer numbers. Those declines range from 10 to 15 percent per decade depending on the season.

The melt of sea ice driven by warming, which also leads to a thinning of the ice, has major implications for the Arctic area. Wildlife like polar bears and walruses that depend on the sea ice can be hampered in their pursuit of prey, and the livelihoods of indigenous communities can be threatened.

Sustained melt has also opened the region to more ship traffic and oil exploration, which pits economic opportunity against potential ecological effects.

This year’s summer melt has seen periods where melt surges ahead, followed by weeks where it levels off. The rate of melt can be affected by the weather in the region, with winds pushing sea ice around and high pressure systems bringing sunny weather that helps fuel melt.

Throughout August, sea ice melted at a steady clip, after a rapid decline in late July. While it’s uncertain exactly where the summer minimum will end up in a few weeks, forecasters can use the rates of decline from previous years (as well as those of recent weeks) to estimate a range of possibilities.

Even if there were no further loss of ice this year, the amount of ice present right now would still replace last year as the sixth lowest extent on record. But since there will be additional melting, the most likely scenarios are for the fourth or third lowest extents, in that order, forecasters with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., have said.

There is a small chance that this year could snag the number two spot from 2007, if melt follows the fastest rate of recent years, which it did for the last 10 days of August, the NSIDC noted.

The lowest extent on record came during the remarkable summer melt season of 2012, fueled in part by summer storms that moved ice into warm waters.

Nearly all sectors of the Arctic Ocean have had below average sea ice concentrations, with the exceptions of Baffin and Hudson bays (both to the north of Canada), where some higher concentrations are sitting in sheltered coastal areas, the NSIDC said.

Read more at Discovery News

Particle Collider Spits Out Tiny Drops of Primordial Goo

A US-based laboratory has produced tiny droplets of a state of matter that existed in the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang after slamming particles together at close to the speed of light.

The matter, known as a quark-gluon plasma (or QGP), is predicted to exist when temperatures and densities are so extreme that regular matter cannot exist. Instead, a “perfect liquid” exists for a short time before it cools and condenses into the regular stuff that forms the building blocks of matter.

Although physicists have announced the detection of this exotic state of matter before, new results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York, appear to show the tiniest droplets of quark-gluon plasma appear, in a specific pattern, after colliding helium-3 nuclei with gold ions.

“These tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma were at first an intriguing surprise,” said Berndt Mueller, Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics at Brookhaven, in a statement. “Physicists initially thought that only the nuclei of large atoms such as gold would have enough matter and energy to set free the quark and gluon building blocks that make up protons and neutrons. But the flow patterns detected by RHIC’s PHENIX (Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) collaboration in collisions of helium-3 nuclei with gold ions now confirm that these smaller particles are creating tiny samples of perfect liquid QGP.”

Experiments at RHIC and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland, have been chasing the formation of this primordial state of matter for some time. In 2013, LHC physicists also announced the discovery of these quark-gluon plasma droplets after slamming protons into lead ions.

But this is the first time that helium-3, a light ion, has been collided with heavy ions (gold), producing the signature of quark-gluon plasma. This indicates that the stuff can be produced at lower energies, opening a fascinating opportunity to study this quantum ‘goo’ that last existed in nature in the first moments of the birth of our universe, some 13.8 billion years ago.

And the initial results seem to show these tiny droplets act as predicted — like a perfect, frictionless liquid.

“The idea that collisions of small particles with larger nuclei might create minute droplets of primordial quark-gluon plasma has guided a series of experiments to test this idea and alternative explanations, and stimulated a rich debate about the implications of these findings,” added physicist Jamie Nagle, of the University of Colorado and co-spokesperson of the PHENIX collaboration at RHIC. “These experiments are revealing the key elements required for creating quark-gluon plasma and could also offer insight into the initial state characteristics of the colliding particles.”

The discovery of a “perfect liquid” stemming from the collision of heavy ions in RHIC was first announced in 2005. Post-collision analysis seemed to show a collective “flow” of matter erupt from the intense flash of energy. This finding was inconsistent with the uniform expansion of a gaseous state of matter, so high-energy physicists realized that they were looking at a new state of matter, composed of quarks (the subatomic building blocks of protons and neutrons) and gluons (a particle, or “boson”, that carries the strong nuclear force) that acts as a perfect liquid. Since these initial discoveries, physicists have refined their accelerator experiments, colliding different ions together, producing different configurations of the quark-gluon plasma.

In this helium-3 experiment, the helium-3 ion (containing 2 protons and 1 neutron) collided with a gold ion. The PHENIX detector picked up a triangular pattern emerge from the collision, each point of the triangle representing 3 tiny hotspots, each one believed to be the scrambled remains of the helium-3′s 2 protons and 1 neutron. And these hotspots behaved just as a quark-gluon should — like a perfect liquid.

Read more at Discovery News

The Curious Case of the Elusive, Slimy Nautilus

Watch this video on The Scene.

Aside from losing a $20,000 camera, by most measures July’s hunt for the ultra-rare crusty nautilus was a rousing success. The camera was stuck 1,000 feet deep when Rick Hamilton at last pulled up Allonautilus scrobiculatus in a cage off the coast of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. And so he grabbed his GoPro and leaped into the water, capturing the first-ever video of a live crusty nautilus, a creature that human eyes haven’t glimpsed since 1984. It was a beauty, and it was…really slimy. And not to tell nautiluses their business, but they aren’t supposed to be really slimy.

You’re probably familiar with the nautilus. It’s that cephalopod (a group that includes the squids and cuttlefish and octopuses) with a beautiful tiger-striped shell that scoots around Earth’s oceans and occasionally runs into things. But this slimy, fuzzy nautilus, it’s more mysterious—far more mysterious. That’s changing thanks to the work of Hamilton, who directs the Nature Conservancy’s Melanesia Program, and other scientists. Not to mention that $20,000 camera, which put in a solid effort. May it rest in peace. (“We still know where it is,” says Hamilton. “I just can’t get it unstuck. I was thinking about selling it on eBay with a ‘pick up as is, where is’ clause.”)

Throughout history, humans have coveted the gorgeous shell of the nautilus—which tends to float around and wash ashore, as many as 11 years after its owner died—for all manner of uses. People turn them into things like jewelry or use them as chalices, which is pretty damn baller. The shell is impressive on the outside, but even more impressive internally. It’s divided into chambers, which progressively shrink as the structure spirals toward the center. By pumping water in and out of these chambers, the animal can control its buoyancy.

The incredible nautilus shell. The actual animal lives only in that big chamber, pumping water in and out of the smaller ones to control its buoyancy. It’s like having an arm floaty–that humans sometimes use as a cup.

So, the crusty nautilus’ hairy, yellow slime. It’s a sort of protein-dense skin called a periostracum, something you’ll also find on bivalves and oceanic snails. “It feels like wet moss,” says Hamilton. “If you push on the nautilus it’ll actually come off, it’ll flake off.” (The creature is informally known as the crusty nautilus because it’s encrusted with this layer of slime, not because it’s brittle or irritable or anything.)

The skin is an adaptation, Hamilton figures, to help the crusty nautilus avoid a trip to the stomach of a predator. This is, after all, a sluggish creature, relying on its armor to survive, as opposed to its cousin the cuttlefish, which instead deploys astounding camouflage. Of particular concern for the crusty is its other cousin the octopus. “They’ll attach onto the shell and drill a hole into them,” says Hamilton, “and then inject a poison that kills them, then pull the meat out. And we think that perhaps the crusty skin makes it a bit slippery. It’s a bit harder for the octopus to attach to the shell.”

You might ask yourself, then, why only the crusty nautilus would get all slimy while another nautilus it shares a habitat with, Nautilus pompilius, does not. And the answer may come down to lifestyle choices. Nautiluses are largely scavengers, feeding on things like fish that have perished and sunk to the ocean bottom, and typically they hang out in the dark depths, wandering great distances along the seafloor.

The crusty nautilus looks a bit like a tennis ball…that was left in the sun…and then grew tentacles and eyes.

But the crusty nautilus is different. Hamilton and his colleagues pulled up a total of eight crusties, successfully tagging one of them as well as one pompilius. Then they tracked their movements. They found that while pompilius tends to migrate horizontally along the seafloor, the crusty nautilus is going about things more vertically. During the day the crusty hangs out in the relative safety of the darker depths, but at night it ventures up the water column, scavenging on reef faces as it ascends. Here it finds an abundance of food—after all, a reef is far more biodiverse than the deep seafloor.

Now, nautiluses, like Batman, rely on darkness for protection. But the crusty nautilus’ roving lifestyle likely exposes it to more predators in the moonlit shallows. Thus would it do well to have a slippery shell as an extra precaution. The creature’s migration may also explain why “compared to the other nautiluses, it’s a bit like the tank of the battlefield,” says Hamilton. “It’s a solider animal.” Being a little beefier would bestow it yet another advantage as predators lurk about.

Both species of nautilus hugging it out.

Where the six species of nautilus can all agree, though, is how sweet it is that they live for so long—like, maybe as long as 100 years. That’s particularly weird because, in general, nature says the bigger you are, the longer you live. A blue whale will live far longer than a fruit fly, for instance. For its size, the nautilus shouldn’t be living anywhere near a century. And why that is isn’t yet clear. Even stranger, other cephalopods like squid and octopuses tend to be short-lived—maybe just a year or two.

That’s not all that separates the nautiluses from the rest of the cephalopod pack. Cephalopods showed up some 550 million years ago—way, way early in the history of complex animal life. Back then, the tentacled beings all had shells, but as the millennia wore on, they diversified and lost their armor, instead opting for camouflage and speed.

The nautilus, though, couldn’t be bothered with such change. It first showed up an incredible 500 million years ago and has held onto that shell all along. And considering the nautilus’ epic time on Earth, the crusty variety showed up really recently, perhaps as few as a million years ago. That’s nothing as far as evolutionary time is concerned. You’re looking at a species in its infancy, one science is just beginning to understand.

Read more at Wired Science

Fluffiest-Tailed Animal, 'Vampire Squirrel,' Captured in Video

The first known video of the mysterious “vampire squirrel” was recently acquired by scientists working in Indonesia, according to a new Science report.

The elusive squirrel, Rheithrosciurus macrotis, is famous both for the vampire-inspired legends surrounding it and for its tail, which last year was hailed as being the fluffiest among all mammals.

Andrew Marshall, a conservation biologist at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues set up 35 motion-triggered video cameras throughout Gunung Palung National Park in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan. The vampire squirrel, also known as the Bornean tufted ground squirrel, is known to live in the park.

“I was sitting at the bar in Jakarta waiting to come home, looking through the pictures, and this (the video) popped up,” Marshall told Science reporter Erik Stokstad.

The video, shot in infrared and not in color because of low light conditions, shows the squirrel foraging through leaves for coveted nuts of the canarium tree. The nuts are so hard that the scientists have no idea how the little, fluffy-tailed squirrel manages to gnaw through them.

The squirrel’s pointy, bat-like ears and mysterious ways probably led to the vampire-like legends surrounding it. Local folklore holds that the 14-inch-long squirrel attacks forest deer and drinks their blood. That has never been substantiated.

Read more at Discovery News

Rare 1,800-Year-Old Sarcophagus Recovered in Israel

Israeli authorities have recovered an impressive Roman-era sarcophagus that construction workers tried to conceal after stumbling upon it at a building site, Israel’s Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced on Thursday.

The 1,800-year-old stone coffin, which the IAA describes as one of the most important and beautiful ever discovered in the country, is sculpted on all sides, weighs two tons and is 2.5 meters (8 feet) long. A life-sized figure of a person is carved on the lid.

The sarcophagus was recovered in the southern coastal city of Ashkelon during an overnight operation between Tuesday and Wednesday. IAA inspectors noticed the finely decorated coffin was severely damaged when building contractors improperly removed it from the ground.

“They decided to hide it, pulled it out of the ground with a tractor while aggressively damaging it,” the IAA wrote in a statement.

The sarcophagus was then hidden beneath a stack of sheet metal and boards.

“The contractors poured a concrete floor in the lot so as to conceal any evidence of the existence of the antiquities site,” the IAA said.

According to Amir Ganor, head of the Inspection Department at the Israel Antiquities Authority, building permission was given on condition that any discovery of antiquities in the area would be reported.

"In this case, the building contractors chose to hide the rare artifact and their action has caused painful damage to history. Legal proceedings will now be taken against those involved, thereby leading to a delay in construction and related expenditures," Ganor said in a statement.

According to archaeologist Gaby Mazor, the sarcophagus was likely made for a wealthy Roman family.

“Such sarcophagi were usually placed in or next to a family mausoleum. The high level of decoration attested to the family’s affluence, which judging by the depicted motifs was probably not Jewish,” Mazor said.

The lid of the sarcophagus is adorned with the carved image of a man, possibly representing the deceased, leaning on his left arm.

“He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt decorated with embroidery on the front. A tunic is wrapped around his waist. The figure’s eyes were apparently inlaid with precious stones that have disappeared and the hair is arranged in curls, in a typical Roman hairstyle,” Mazor said.

Read more at Discovery News