
Japan’﻿s Pioneering Detector Set ﻿To Join Hunt for Gravitational Waves - toufiqbarhamov
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07867-z
======
perlgeek
This article leaves me with more questions than answers :-)

I seem to recall that LIGO budget was in the billions, this on the order of
150M. Where does this huge difference in costs come from? Is it related to
LIGO being the first, and now some previous unknowns are now known? Or
something else entirely? Digging those tunnels can't have been cheap...

What's the expected sensitivity, compared to LIGO and Virgo?

~~~
magicalhippo
As far as I can tell, the 1.1 billion figure for LIGO includes[1] all of the
test projects and other stuff. As far as I can tell it seems the ~150M figure
for KAGRA is just for the KAGRA project.

[1]:
[https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/system/media_files/binaries/300...](https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/system/media_files/binaries/300/original/ligo-
fact-sheet.pdf)

------
staunch
Crossing my fingers for verification. It seems like the Nobel committee should
have waited for multiple third-party verifications of LIGO's results.

It would be pretty terrible if we found out the detections were mistaken or
even fraudulent.

From what I can understand, LIGO's results seem very open to interpretation.
It seems like they could be mistaking noise for signal. And it even seems
possible that some unscrupulous person(s) could have created fake signals,
using something like the "blind injection" mechanism.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It doesn't seem like the
evidence is strong enough yet to say definitively that GW even exist.

~~~
perlgeek
Wasn't the neutron star merger, that was followed up on by multiple optical
(and even neutrino detections, iirc), a pretty good validation?

I mean, how else would they have known what to look for?

Update: this is the event I'm talking about:
[https://astrobites.org/2017/10/16/multi-messenger-
observatio...](https://astrobites.org/2017/10/16/multi-messenger-observations-
of-a-binary-neutron-star-merger/)

Also, are there any peer-reviewed, serious criticisms of the existing
gravitational wave observations papers that I could read? I've read the
objections a few times now, but only in popular media, not in scientific
discourse.

~~~
T-A
Current state of the controversy, with links to papers, here:

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/two-independent-
anal...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/two-independent-analyses-
confirm-ligos-discovery-of-gravitational-waves/)

