 Quote by Garth
I personally expect GWs to be eventually detected, however, after linking to an article describing Einstein's ambivalence over GWs, the OP question was "So do Gravitational Waves exist?" That question becomes more pertinent the longer their non-detection continues.
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I think we're still in the stage where we would have been surprised if we had detected them. LIGO doesn't have the sensitivity to see most of the conventional gravitational wave sources, and those that it can see require a great deal of luck.
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Now as for that paper's expected limit for neutron star/BH mergers. If we, for the moment, accept that short GRBs are such mergers and they are detected about once a month, and they are relatively nearby, though not necessarily in the Milky Way, then we might expect ~ 10 neutron star mergers per year in the Milky Way galaxy.
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Our understanding of short GRBs is extremely crude and any failure to detect such a signal would almost certainly be due to a failure in those models, not in our theory of gravity. Given the high-quality data that came from PSR 1913+16, the only way you'll see astronomers/physicists seriously questioning the existence of gravitational waves is if we point our detectors at a source that we
know is above our threshold of sensitivity and get no detection.
The only observations that tell us anything about gravitational waves have come out in favor of them. None of the direct detection experiments have been able to address GR, they've only been able to put limits on the frequency of certain astrophysical events.
Science Advisor
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