On February 2016, the leaders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced that they had successfully detected gravitational waves, subtle ripples in the fabric of space-time that had been stirred up by the collision of two black holes. The team held a press conference in Washington to announce the landmark findings.
They also released their data.
Now a team of independent physicists has sifted through this data, only to find what they describe as strange correlations that shouldn’t be there. The team, led by Andrew Jackson, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, claims that the troublesome signal could be significant enough to call the entire discovery into question. The potential effects of the unexplained correlations “could range from a minor modification of the extracted wave form to a total rejection of LIGO’s claimed discovery,” wrote Jackson in an email to Quanta. LIGO representatives say there may well be some unexplained correlations, but that they should not affect the team’s conclusions.
Good article:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/strange-noise-in-gravitational-wave-data-sparks-debate-20170630/
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A scientific argument has broken out over claims that gravitational waves, ripples through the fabric of space-time predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago, have been detected for a third time.
Scientists first detected the shudders in space-time last year and the discovery was hailed the ‘biggest scientific breakthrough of the century’ – and researchers have since done it twice more.
However, since releasing their data in February, the results have come under scrutiny from other researchers – who say they have found ‘strange correlations that shouldn’t be there’ in the form of unexpected noise in the signals.
A simpler article but non-the-less a good read for beginners:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4662434/Controversy-gravitational-wave-discovery.html
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macx
:)