Kelly Holley-Bockelmann

As I said, you need to keep the instrument as stable as possible.

And there was a big, like, how are you actually going to make LISA?

You need to have, you know, what about solar wind?

Could that push the test mass, et cetera?

So there was this Pathfinder mission called LISA Pathfinder.

And its only job, its only job was to say, how still can we hold that test mass into space?

And it performed exquisitely, like a thousand times better than it was expected to perform.

And when you look at, you know, the tiny fluctuations in the test mass way afterwards, the tiny fluctuations were.

were caused by individual air molecules hitting that test mass.

Because they didn't outgas, they thought, ah, we don't really need to be this accurate, so we won't outgas as well as we thought.

But heck yeah, individual air molecules.

the constellation is a big enclosure for that test mass and so it will react and move in such a way to like counteract the solar wind motion but keep that test mass still

Wow.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

There's radiation pressure as well.

And so, you know, you build the instrument with, you know, with the ability to compensate for that fact of known radiation pressure.

If dark matter were primordial black holes and if some of them were to merge or even be close enough so that they're orbiting on, you know, a half hour, hour time scales, they will be observable with LISA.

So I've been working on predictions for what the LISA's signature would be of these primordial black holes.

And yeah, definitely if they're there, LISA would detect them.