[sleavey]

There have been three signals witnessed in about 12 months of observations - of course the models need some tuning to correctly, automatically, trigger alerts. In any case, you are referring to the _online_ triggers which look very quickly at the data and try to guess if an apparent signal is real before informing electromagnetic observatories to follow up. The real analysis is conducted _offline_ in a much slower, careful way with lots of checks and balances on the state of the instruments to rule out artificial signals. That's one of the main reasons why it took 5 months between the first detection and the publication of the paper announcing it.

In terms of corroborating evidence, remember that the two independent LIGO detectors - 3000km apart - saw the event within 10ms of each other. That's enough corroborating evidence for a lot of people. The NASA text file you link shows no observed electromagnetic counterpart, but that's expected: unfortunately the best models so far for black hole coalescences predict very little or no electromagnetic emission - so although EM partners were informed, the chances of them seeing anything were slim. Other predicted sources of gravitational waves, like as-yet unseen binary neutron star coalescences, are more likely to emit EM radiation and stand a chance of being witnessed by conventional observatories as "corroboration".

[nonbel]

>"In terms of corroborating evidence, remember that the two independent LIGO detectors - 3000km apart - saw the event within 10ms of each other. That's enough corroborating evidence for a lot of people."

I don't see what the first part of the post has to do with the null ("background noise") model being inapplicable to situations where special human intervention comes into play. Do they include any events like that in the background timeseries or not? I am suspecting not (which renders the model false and hence false alarm rates/sigma values meaningless), but do not know for sure.

Second, that is just a detection. Corroboration occurs when your model predicts multiple types of observations related to a phenomena (measured by different types of instruments). This weakening of definitions is concerning to me if it has infected physics. I have seen that trick used a lot by "softer" fields such as medicine/psych (eg their definition of a replication is just seeing "an effect" in the same direction).

[nonbel]

Also, I read somewhere that they had 6 additional signals they haven't reported yet (can't find it at the moment).

I guess we will see once the count gets into the dozens. If it happens without any kind of outside way to verify these signals are inspiraling black hole events it will definitely be interesting to see how the physics community deals with it.