[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Hadn't heard much about this. I was worried that the initial detection might have been a flash in the pan. It now appears that they are starting to collect statistics.

[IronJack]

Do gravitational waves travel at the speed of light?

[InterceptPoint]

Does anyone know how they are measuring the distance to the event, the number of light-years?

It seems to me that they need to know that value in order to calculate the masses of the source of the gravitational wave but the means by which they accomplish the measurement is less than obvious.

[sportutegrl]

If you like to party, the Cal Tech LIGO at Hanford will be having a post eclipse party on August 21, at 6:00 pm. There will be walking tours of the miles long laser. At 6:00 pm, Professor Weiss will give a lecture on Einstein and eclipse. At 7:30 ANOTHER lecture! I am so there. Tickets are free. Let’s geek out.

[Garth Tater]

It now appears that they are starting to collect statistics.

or maybe not:

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LIGO'S RECENT DETECTION OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES CAUSED BY MERGING BLACK HOLES - Stephen J. Crothers

Take away from the article (emphases mine):

"Signal GW150914 was extracted from a database containing tens of thousands of numerically determined waveforms generated on the false assumptions of the existence of black holes and gravitational waves. A 'generic' signal cGW was initially reported by LIGO , after which powerful computers extracted GW150914 from the waveform data base for a best fit element."


“The initial detection was made by low-latency searches for generic gravitational-wave transients [41] and was reported within three minutes of data acquisition [43]. Subsequently, matched-filter analyses that use relativistic models of compact binary waveforms [44] recovered GW150914 as the most significant event from each detector for the observations reported here." Abbott et al. [1]

" With such powerful computing resources and so many degrees of freedom it is possible to best fit just about any LIGO instability with an element of its numerically determined waveform database. This is indeed the outcome for the LIGO-Virgo Collaborations, as they have managed to best fit a numerically determined waveform for and to entities that not only do not exist, but are not even consistent with General Relativity itself. This amplifies the futility of applying numerical and perturbation methods to ill-posed problems."

"There are no known Einstein field equations for two or more masses and hence no known solutions thereto. There is no existence theorem by which it can even be asserted that Einstein's field equations contain latent capability for describing configurations of two or more masses [4,23,24,47]. General Relativity cannot account for the simple experimental fact that two fixed suspended masses approach one another upon release. It is for precisely these reasons that all the Big Bang models treat the universe as a single mass, an ideal indivisible fluid of uniform macroscopic density and pressure that permeates the entire universe."