Gravitational Waves: Verification Accuracy & Physicists' Opinions

[arupel]

From what I understand the LIGO experiments were the first in the road to demonstrating the existence of gravitational waves. There was a dicussion about this on Utube where someone pointed out that the polarized light scattered from dust, being much larger, could mask the the effect of gravitational waves.

Since the LIGO experiments are measurements of something almost impossibly small, what is the current opinion among physicists about the verification of gravitation waves?

 

[phyzguy]

You're conflating two different observations. There was a report from an experiment called BICEP, which had claimed to see the indirect signal due to gravitational waves in the very early universe. It's now agreed by most scientists that these observations were more likely due to polarization due to dust in our galaxy, so people are still searching for these "B-mode" signals that would indicate the presence of gravitational waves in the early universe.

This is very different from the LIGO experiment, which measured the gravitational waves directly from black hole - black hole mergers, and more recently a neutron star - neutron star merger. I think, since these gravitational waves have been seen by both LIGO observatories in the US, and by the Virgo observatory in Europe, that most scientists would agree that we are really measuring gravitational waves.