some weeks ago, a number of our colleagues became unaccountably busy, disappearing into their offices, holding long, late night telecons, haranguing stressed postdocs
what they had in common was their membership of the LIGO science collaboration
well, social networks report that at the LIGO-VIRGO meeting all was revealed
the LIGO Internal Affairs division had done a blind injection of an artificial realistic gravitational radiation event to see if the data analysis pipeline actually performs as advertised
apparently it did, the blip was picked up, I presume we will hear soon how well they recovered the injection parameters, but in the meantime some postdocs can go get some sleep
false alarm
Amber at Living LIGO has the gritty details - and gave me the h/t that this could be spoken of in public without the LIGO ninjas coming after me,
again.
PS: Dear Very Senior LIGO people:
no one breached confidence on the LIGO event and analysis.
At all.
Seriously.
For reference, consider the Holmes story "Silver Blaze".
Sometimes absence of evidence is itself evidence...
How cruel :~â¬
Was it identified as a fake? e.g. were the analysts clever enough to notice something fishy about the data?