…and supermassive fiscal meetings, too. See you at 1:05 p.m.
He replaced his headphones once he heard her move into a conference room with Rossi and Dr. O’Connor-Young. Then he sketched the Cassiopeia constellation and scarfed down an early sandwich from the cafeteria until her LIGO file came through. Opening its export spreadsheets, he enlarged them on his monitor, rolled his sleeves up over his forearms, and got to work—
—only to surface an hour later with his ears aching underneath the clamp of his headphones, his neck and wrists stiff with the intensity of his focus, still standing despite his lowered desk, and with his brain buzzing like Junipero Serra Freeway at rush hour.
“Because twenty-seven plus eighteen is forty-five. Not thirty-two,” he confirmed out loud.
The math was easier than breathing.
And the relevant mass delineated in Erin’s data was thirty-two suns. Not forty-five.
It should’ve been forty-five.
Unless…
The clock on his monitor read 1:00 p.m.
He couldn’t wait, pushing past his empty chair hard enough to send it spinning into the wall he shared with another adjoining supply closet—a mop toppled audibly, followed by the clatter of dominoing chemical spray bottles—he rushed to the door, wrenching it open—to find her already there, a hand raised to knock.
“I know I’m early, but—”
“I found something.”
“What?”
“You need to see this.” Ignoring the heads popping up over cubicle walls in the bullpen, he seized her arm, towing her into his office and back to his desk. Not even her sweater riding up to reveal the jut of her hip bone and the freckles scattered across her stomach could distract him. He turned his monitor to show her the LIGO exports alongside his calculations. “Look. I saw it in your interferometer data. I don’t know what this means for quantum gravity as a whole, since it’s just one event and data point to reference—”
“You saw the principle of… addition?” She frowned.
“No, I—I’d planned to start Dr. Kramer’s status report earlier, until—but this could be relevant to our event horizon model.”
“What?” again. But this time, her frown was for the tiny numbers on his screen. Angling her glasses on her nose, tugging her sweater back into place, she dropped her backpack to the carpet and moved closer.
“It’s possible that LIGO is detecting thermal radiation emitting from black holes,” he said.
A breathless pause. She blinked. “What?!”
“SVLAC’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is—”
“—picking up naturally occurring Hawking radiation?”
“Yes. The holometer’s construction and function is based on interferometer technology, so I’m familiar with how your instrument works.” He highlighted the relevant mass differences, then dragged up a recent multi-messenger astronomy review from Kitt Peak beside LIGO’s raw data; Arizona’s observatory confirmed the merger of two black holes on the same date as the detector’s output. “The mass of the black holes that merged during the interferometer’s activation time was calculated as equivalent to about twenty-seven and eighteen suns, respectively. The merger should’ve resulted in a mass of forty-five suns. But it didn’t.”
“The combined mass is calculated at… at thirty-two suns, instead.” She verified the documents’ export dates. Her ponytail tilted over her shoulder to brush his arm across the desk. Its strands shivered with the acceleration of her breath. “Which isn’t mathematically possible—”
“Unless some of that mass was lost.”
“And the only way that it could’ve been lost…” Her eyes flickered up to his. Her pupils were cavernous, now:excitement,incredulous wonder.
“…is if that mass radiated off as gravitational waves.”
“After the initial collision, a portion of the infalling waves would’ve been reflected away from the new black hole. Back to LIGO’s detectors. These second waves would be weaker and slightly delayed when compared with the gravitational waves from the actual merger.”
“They are.”
“Which… which tells us that Hawking’s theory about the emission of thermal radiation from black holes is observable in the wild, not just in a lab. We can measure it through LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves. We might be able to eavesdrop on the behavior of mass and matter at the event horizons of black holes! Actual black holes!”
“There’s your sole-author paper forNature Physics.”
