Apr 19, 2021 3:28 PM EDT One day a little more than five years ago, Ely Kovetz was having lunch with his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, discussing a tantalizing rumor. Like many in the physics community, Kovetz had heard the buzz about a possible signal from a newly operational US physics observatory. The observatory was designed to pick up disturbances in the fabric of spacetime, ripples created by, among other things, black holes crashing into each other. Most intriguingly, the signal appeared to have been created by massive objects, far heavier than anyone expected. That pointed at some eyebrow-raising possibilities.