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I took that sentence to mean "independent" as in having some confirmation other than the gravitational wave signal. That's provided by the optical observations
by tobinfricke 7y ago
I took that sentence to mean "independent" as in having some confirmation other than the gravitational wave signal. That's provided by the optical observations of GW170817 which confirm independently that the event is real.
> there aren't exactly other ligos around
One of the three currently operating GW detectors is Virgo, of a different design and build by different people, in Italy. It's true that LIGO and Virgo collaborate extensively.
- dnautics 7y agoFor reference here are the data for the so far, only reported collaboratively observed incident: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW170814_signal.png#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW170814_signal.pn... While I'm not a signals expert... I'm not exactly convinced.
- tobinfricke 7y agoThere is a lot more data than simply that figure on Wikipedia. For example, you may download all of the raw gravitational wave strain data and re-analyze it yourself if you felt so inclined. The LIGO community has done an amazing job with the "open science center" that releases both the timeseries data and tools useful in processing it. https://www.gw-openscience.org/about/ https://www.gw-openscience.org/about/ There are eleven peer-reviewed published papers on this event, in addition to a complete public release of the time series data. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/detection-companion-papers https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/detection-companion-papers