http://news.discovery.com/space/more-gravitational-wave-rumors-colliding-black-holes-160208.htm

“Spies who have seen the paper say they have seen gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger,” wrote theoretical physicist Clifford Burgess, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, in an email to his faculty that was leaked to Twitter last week. “They claim that the two detectors detected it consistent with it moving at speed c given the distance between them, and quote an equivalent 5.1 sigma detection,” he continues. “The bh masses were 36 and 29 solar masses initially and 62 at the end. Apparently the signal is spectacular and they even see the ring-down to kerr at the end.”

This would be awesome if true- I talked to the LIGO folks about 8 years ago when they were upgrading the detectors… one of them said something like “After the upgrade we really better detect them”, I said something along the lines of “But wouldn’t it be more interesting if you DIDN’T since that would mean possibly new science awaits…” he disagreed, saying while that may be true, it would be hard to explain that to the public after all that was spent building the detectors…

I hope its true, but I am suspicious due to the rumor stating ” The bh masses were 36 and 29 solar masses initially and 62 at the end”… stellar black hole masses – I think- tend to be smaller than that:
http://stellarcollapse.org/sites/default/files/bhmasses.pdf
http://blackholes.stardate.org/objects/type.php?p=stellar-mass
But I am not an astrophysicist….

Maybe there is selection bias, maybe we can only detect the big and rare ones merging…

We will know soon…Thursday is the official announcement- Right now all we know for sure is that either way a LOT of people are going to be pissed off with Clifford Burgess…