Comment on: "Low significance of evidence for black hole echoes in gravitational wave data"

Understand

In a recent publication (1612.00266), we demonstrated that the events in the first observing run of the Advanced LIGO gravitational wave observatory (aLIGO O1) showed tentative evidence for repeating "echoes from the abyss" caused by Planck-scale structure near black hole horizons.

• By considering a phenomenological echo model, we showed that the pure noise hypothesis is disfavored with a p-value of 1%, i.e.
• higher amplitude for echoes than those in aLIGO O1 events are only recovered in 1% of random noise realizations.
• A recent preprint by Westerweck, et al.