Wow, I just read about the latest gravitational wave and I see that once again they detected it by deviating from the procedure used to generate the background

Wow, I just read about the latest gravitational wave and I see that once again they detected it by deviating from the procedure used to generate the background model: >"Although such times are in general not included in searches, it was determined that LHO strain data were unaffected 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_submitted.pdf 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 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-PRLpublished.pdf 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14462719