Thanks! This brings a lot of context to the table. I have very little sense of how much the two detectors should add to the credibility of the finding. It seem

Thanks! This brings a lot of context to the table. I have very little sense of how much the two detectors should add to the credibility of the finding. It seems like it would depend on the causes of instrumental bias and how much they vary among detectors. However, I can definitely say that modeling background with a 12th order polynomial fit is not going to be robust. Any competent statistician would have said so if consulted. That it is the standard method among astronomers is just depressing, not at all confidence-boosting. And I don't think that just reducing the threshold when a more robust method is used will yield equivalent results. Hopefully this prompts a thorough review and overhaul of astronomy's parochial and outdated approach to statistical data analysis.