10 New Gravitational Waves Discovered in LIGO Data
9 Apr 2022 14:59:25 UTC
Topic 227363
(moderation:
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-ten-gravitational-ligo-virgo-o3a.amp
“But outliers were hiding in the data. Expanding the search, an international group of astrophysicists re-examined the data and found 10 additional black hole mergers, all outside the detection threshold of the LVC's original analysis.”
It's all within the
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It's all within the "statistical methodology that sacrifices some sensitivity to the sources that LVC approaches are most likely to find in order to gain sensitivity to the sources that LVC approaches are most likely to miss, such as rapidly spinning black holes." Which doesn't put a sigma value on these ten results, alas. But there's a hint of more detail to come soon.
There's a not-so-subtle point behind this. Some decades ago resonant bar detectors were subject to huge controversy due to the application of detection criteria post hoc ie. after the fact ( see Gravity's Shadow by Harry Collins ). The sigma value is a way of quantifying the question : what are the odds that a 'signal' is merely random chance aggregation of detector responses ? If one accepts a lower sigma value then there's a greater chance of being fooled. The gold standard here is to meet or exceed five standard deviations. By way of comparison, three-sigma events occur everyday at Las Vegas ie. by pure luck.
Well, then ..... watch this space.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal