A fresh examination of high-resolution photographs of the Shroud of Turin concludes that the cloth’s faint body image is best explained by a burst of radiation, rather than by paint, scorch marks or ordinary decay processes, according to a peer-reviewed article released on 18 June 2025 in the International Journal of Archaeology (Vol. 13, Issue 1). The sole author, chemical engineer Thomas McAvoy of the University of Maryland, applied principal-component analysis and other pattern-recognition tools to both visible-light and ultraviolet-induced-fluorescence images and found that almost all information in the pictures collapses onto a single component that mirrors raw pixel intensity.
McAvoy reports that when the intensity map is mathematically differentiated, it yields a height-relief effect identical to the three-dimensional model first produced by a NASA-derived VP-8 image analyser in 1976, suggesting that depth cues are intrinsic to the cloth’s image rather than artefacts of photography.
Because radiation is the only mechanism known to generate both grayscale intensities and latent 3-D information without penetrating beyond a few micrometres of linen fibre, the paper states that “the results support the radiation hypothesis” and calls for direct tests on the relic to identify the exact type—whether electromagnetic, particle or thermonuclear.
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The Shroud, a 4.4-metre linen sheet kept in Turin’s cathedral, has long been venerated by some Christians as Jesus’ burial cloth. Carbon-dating in 1988 produced a medieval age, but critics have argued that later contamination skewed those results. McAvoy’s study does not address the textile’s date; instead, it focuses on the physics of image formation and says artificial-intelligence methods can help separate genuine surface features from centuries of damage and repairs.
Received by the journal on 5 May and accepted eleven days later, the article appears under an open-access licence from Science Publishing Group, making all code and processed images available for replication. Whether the radiation scenario survives further scrutiny will depend on tests that require direct sampling—something custodians have rarely allowed since a limited series of material studies in 1978.