I don’t know the details, but the detection process is essentially statistical and very very noisy. It’s not a “we’ll know it when we see it” case, it’s more like “out of the huge number of wiggles and wobbles that we have recorded, what can’t we explain and therefore might be a grav wave”.
I would guess one of the points is that a single observation is unreliable in a high-noise environment.
I don’t know the details, but the detection process is essentially statistical and very very noisy. It’s not a “we’ll know it when we see it” case, it’s more like “out of the huge number of wiggles and wobbles that we have recorded, what can’t we explain and therefore might be a grav wave”.
I would guess one of the points is that a single observation is unreliable in a high-noise environment.