(CNN) Scientists from the University of Kentucky say they're working to perfect a technique to digitally unravel fragile ancient texts that haven't been read in nearly 2,000 years.

W. Brent Seales, who heads the University of Kentucky's Digital Restoration Initiative, told CNN he and his research team just returned from a trip to England where they took detailed images of the scrolls from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, using a facility called a synchotron.

This synchotron, the Diamond Light Source , accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light, so that they emit light 10 billion times brighter than the sun.

The synchotron tunes energy to be "very focused, like a laser," Seales said. "The waves go right through very quickly."

They hope to read scrolls buried by Vesuvius

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