Comment on "Analysis of Ringdown Overtones in GW150914''

Abstract

Cotesta et al. (2022) reanalyze the GW150914 ringdown, arguing against the presence of an overtone and suggesting claims of its detection in Isi et al. (2019) were driven by noise. Here we point out a number of technical errors in that analysis, including a software bug, and show that features highlighted as problematic are in fact expected and encountered in simulated data. After fixes, the code in used in Cotesta et al. (2022) produces results consistent with the presence of the overtone. All code and data are available at https://github.com/maxisi/gw150914_rd_commentComment: 2 pages, 2 figures; a reproducible article prepared with ShowYourWork hosted at https://github.com/maxisi/gw150914_rd_commen