Volume 3: Dance of the Aurora Chapter 22: Primordial Black Hole
The people on duty in the laboratory, including Arnold himself, who were attracted by his screams, quickly put aside the miserable state of his pants and stared at the computer screen intently.
The Chinese guy just now was no exception. At this moment, the gloom on his face was completely replaced by excitement.
His name is Shen Yikui, and he is a doctoral student who just enrolled at Caltech this academic year.
To be precise, he is still a master's student, because his project requires him to get a master's degree first and then a doctorate degree.
If students have levels when receiving education, then Shen Yikui is at the king level in all seasons.
Since primary school, he has won many science awards at the school, district and city levels. In junior high school, he started to learn about competitions and won the first prize in a city-level English speech contest, and was finally admitted to a key high school. In high school, he also won the first prize in a national physics competition and a city-level patent, and was finally directly admitted to the university he wanted to go to.
Originally, he could have gone abroad directly to a private Ivy League school to study for his undergraduate degree when he graduated from high school, but his parents wanted him to first build up some connections at a top domestic university. After all, he would be able to go abroad when he applied for a doctorate, and it wouldn't cost him any money.
Of course, his course grades have always been among the best, and he has never fallen out of the top three in the school throughout high school. This result was achieved even though he spent a lot of energy studying for competitions in his spare time.
After being admitted to university, he felt like a duck to water. In addition to being particularly good at improving his GPA, he also won a lot of awards as usual. He entered the laboratory during his undergraduate studies and published a paper in a major Nature journal as a co-first author.
When he graduated, his overall GPA was second in the department, and this GPA included his sports score. In fact, he was the captain of the school badminton team during his undergraduate studies and led the team to win two gold medals at the National University Games.
During the application season of his senior year, he received full scholarship doctoral offers from both MIT and Caltech. Then he heard from people around him that there were more delicious food and fun things to do in Los Angeles, so he chose Caltech.
California is also the state with the most national parks. You can reach six national parks within a five-hour drive from Los Angeles, including the famous Giant Sequoias and Death Valley.
Shen Yikui has been participating in various outdoor sports with his parents since he was a child, and he would never let go of the opportunity to experience the national park in person.
In this way, his life went smoothly and he entered the first year of his doctorate. During the summer vacation, he got an opportunity to intern at LIGO and personally operate the experimental equipment that had won the Nobel Prize.
He is now full of confidence about his future.
Then, his home disappeared inexplicably and everything returned to zero.
Although he doesn't know this yet, at this point he has completely lost contact with his relatives in China, which makes him very worried about the safety of his parents.
So he had already booked an extremely expensive flight back home and would be flying directly to Shanghai four days later.
"Have you contacted the Louisiana lab yet?"
"I just called to confirm. The data they observed is basically consistent with ours, but they think there is a problem with the instrument so they are investigating it and did not notify us first."
Everyone's attention was drawn to Arnold, who had already changed into new pants.
"They also collected similar evidence, but..."
He leaned over the computer and clicked on the results he had processed. After zooming in, the monotonous data on the computer released a collective silence to everyone in the laboratory.
"…Are you sure you didn't make a mistake?"
"I calculated it twice using different methods and the estimated data I got is the same. However, the completely rigorous data is still being run and the results will be available in a few minutes."
"This... this may be one of the greatest experimental discoveries in the development of cosmology so far."
The estimated data on the screen tells us that the source of this gravitational wave is within 500 astronomical units from the sun, which means it is less than 747,9893,5350 kilometers away from the sun itself.
This distance is quite close on the scale of the entire universe. After all, there are more than 60,000 astronomical units in one light year. The gravitational waves generated by the black hole merger detected by LIGO in 2017 are 1.4 billion light years away from the Earth.
The source is not very large, and it can be detected by experimental equipment on the surface of the earth only because it is too close.
If the source of this gravitational wave is indeed inside the solar system, it will lead to a very interesting conclusion.
Edward Witten, the father of string theory, published a very sci-fi article in 2020, in which he predicted that there is a high probability that there is a ninth celestial body at the edge of the solar system, but that celestial body is not an ordinary gas or solid planet, but a small black hole.
The reason for this conclusion is that the existing theory cannot explain the abnormal behavior of the orbit of the Kuiper Belt in the solar system, so people assume that there should be such a celestial body not too far from the sun, and that distance is exactly 500 astronomical units.
If this celestial body is really confirmed to exist by gravitational wave detection, it will cause a huge sensation in the entire astronomical community.
Because it can only be a primordial black hole.
Primordial black holes are just a hypothetical type of black hole, and no instrument has ever actually observed them. They are created by the huge local pressure and ultra-high density and temperature generated in the early stage of the Big Bang. In other words, they are the conclusive evidence that the Big Bang did happen.
The black hole created after the death of a star has a minimum mass. Anything smaller than this can only be a primordial black hole. Therefore, this black hole not far from the solar system, which is obviously smaller than that mass, can only have been formed by the Big Bang.
If humans really discover primordial black holes, then by exploring these black holes we will obtain a large amount of first-hand information related to the Big Bang.
At this moment, everyone in the laboratory is staring at the data processing software, which is trying its best to calculate the specific location of the source of the gravitational waves.
When the number appeared on the screen, everyone in the room gasped.
"I really miscalculated this time."
Arnold also felt that the calculation was wrong, so he changed the computer and ran the calculation again. Three or four other doctoral students were also doing the same calculation.
All results are the same number.
What is certain is that the source of this gravitational wave is definitely not the primordial black hole, because it is right on the surface of the earth.
