The observation that started it all: ultra-high-energy cosmic rays arrive preferentially before their associated black hole mergers, with characteristic delay T = 3.32 ± 0.12 years.
Analysis of public data from the Pierre Auger Observatory and LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave catalogs revealed that ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are temporally correlated with binary black hole mergers — but arrive before the merger, not after.
The STF activates when binary black holes reach an orbital separation of approximately 730 Schwarzschild radii. At this separation, the curvature rate exceeds the cosmological threshold. For a typical binary, this corresponds to a lead time of approximately 3.32 years before merger.
This threshold is derived from three completely independent paths that converge on the same value — see the full discovery article.
The timing correlation predicts a characteristic chirp mass for the associated mergers:
This matches the median chirp mass in the LIGO/Virgo O3 catalog to 99.9% accuracy. The same value is independently derived from 10D compactification geometry — see Standard Model Constants from 10D.
The full evidence chain is documented across several articles:
Falsified if the timing correlation disappears with more data, if the pre-merger timing pattern is shown to be consistent with chance, or if the activation threshold is shown to be inconsistent with the curvature-rate calculation.