I'm an amateur but something feels amiss to me here. Can anyone shed more light on this contradiction?
[1] https://www.ligo.org/detections.php
After following the major science experiments over the last ~15 years, I've gotten the impression that the LIGO team is being very careful to not announce anything prematurely.
In an interview[2] with Prof. Rana Adhikari about the first detection, he describes how incredibly lucky it was to detect a very strong wave in the middle of the detector's sensitivity range, only ~30 minutes after each site independently enabled data collection. That's the type of situation that raises serious questions about the validity of the data and might even suggest sabotage (someone could be faking data). Fortunately, it sounds like they were careful to investigate the alternative explanations, including searching the labs for anything that looked like a possible sabotage device. It's always good to see scientists paying extra attention to rigor.
>"Although such times are in general not included in searches, it was determined that LHO strain data were una ffected by the procedure at frequencies above 30 Hz, and may thus be used to identify a GW source and measure its properties." https://www.ligo.org/detections/GW170608/paper/GW170608_subm...
I'm not saying they aren't seeing anything, but the false alarm rate calculations are meaningless unless they process the data the exact same way for background. They keep making these special exceptions every time.
EDIT:
Mostly just saving this for myself...
Here it is for the 5th detection:
>"Single-detector gravitational-wave triggers had never been disseminated before in low latency. Given the temporal coincidence with the Fermi-GBM GRB, however, a GCN Circular was issued at 13:21:42 UTC (LIGO Scientific Collaboration & Virgo Collaboration et al. 2017a) reporting that a highly significant candidate event consistent with a BNS coalescence was associated with the time of the GRB."
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9
4th detection:
This one looks clean (but for the 1st detection the questionable info was not included in the main paper).
https://www.ligo.org/detections/GW170814/paper/GW170814-PRLp...
2nd detection:
>"Since GW150914 had already been confirmed as a real gravitational-wave signal [4], it was removed from the data when estimating the noise background."
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.241103
Earlier discussion about 1st and 3rd detections:
Its claimed "significance estimates come solely from the offline analysis", which seemed to satisfy me at the time... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14462719