Enlarge / LIGO’s February 11, 2016, press conference in Washington, DC, where they announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves. (credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Just last month, we told you about a small group of Danish physicists who were casting doubt on the original gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), saying it was an “illusion.” The researchers alleged that the collaboration mistook patterns in the noise for a signal. Now Quanta is reporting that two independent analyses have been completed that confirm that detection. This should lay any doubts about the momentous discovery to rest.
“We see no justification for lingering doubts about the discovery of gravitational waves,” the authors of one of the papers, Martin Green and John Moffat of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, told Quanta. That paper appeared Physics Letters B in September. A second paper by Alex Nielsen of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany, and three coauthors, was posted to the physics preprint site arXiv.org last month and is under review by the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
But some drama still remains. Andrew Jackson, group spokesman for the skeptical physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, is refusing to accept the results of the two independent groups’ analyses. Quanta‘s Natalie Wolchover writes:
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