Dear readers,
You may have already heard about Kerr Trisector Closure. A consistency test for the Kerr hypothesis that tries to stay honest about what is actually being inferred from data. We have almost finished KTC as for project submission and would like you invite everyone to share their opinions or feedback towards this.
If you haven’t read about the paper or do not know what it is you can certainly view everything here.
You can begin or start a discussion by typing a comment below.
Saw your post on twitter, the core idea is strong and well motivated, but I would encourage you to be a bit more explicit about the assumptions that go into treating the three sectors as statistically independent. In particular, correlations introduced by shared priors, distance estimates, or calibration systematics could affect the interpretation of
$$
T^2 = r^\top C^{-1} r
$$
and deserve clearer discussion. I also think the sensitivity claims would benefit from a more transparent connection between projected uncertainties in $(M,a)$ and realistic observational systematics, especially on the imaging side. That said, the framework itself is sound, and these are the kinds of refinements that naturally come next once the main conceptual structure is in place.
Really nice idea. I like that KTC doesn’t try to tweak GR or add extra parameters, but instead asks a very clean question!
I would like to see a sharper discussion of how robust the closure statistic
$$
T^2 = r^\top C^{-1} r
$$
is against correlated systematics, especially those shared between inspiral and ringdown inference. At present, the statistical idealization is clear, but the boundary between formal consistency and practical observability could be better delineated. These are not flaws in the idea, but important points to tighten before confronting real data.
Dear Daniel,
I appreciate your concerns related to the closure statistic against correlated systematics. However this paper was explicitly simplified so that it can still be presentable at Jugend Forscht 2026. Ofcourse we have rigorously derived these concerns in our actual preprint.
I’m genuinely impressed by how cleanly this comes together. You’ve taken a simple but deep idea that one Kerr metric should describe everything and you’ve expressed it in a form that is both testable and mathematically honest. Writing the closure as something like
$$
T^2 = r^\top C^{-1} r
$$
shows good instinct. For someone at your stage, this level of conceptual discipline and restraint is very encouraging.
Thank you so much Prof. Brenner for taking the time to review my work. I really appreciate it.