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The current title is former title was How error bars on recent speed of gravity determination from gravitational waves and coincident gamma ray burst? Was Hubble constant in there? and it is explained in this comment

Thank you for point that out! I remember struggling this morning trying to get the title to be under 150 characters as required by SE, and it looks like after several edits it's become unparsable. If I had 240 characters the title would be more like

For the recent determination of the speed of gravity based on the timing between the detection of gravitational waves and nearly-coincident gamma ray bursts, how were the error bars determined? Was the Hubble constant used as part of this?

If you can think of a better title please feel free to edit. Otherwise I'll have a look tomorrow.

Can someone propose a title that captures enough of the key words to be specific, searchable and "attractive" in the sense that it encourages those interested in the topic to see what the answers say, but isn't overly lengthy?

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How about this:

Gravitational waves and gamma ray burst: how were the error bars determined for the recent speed of gravity calculation? Was Hubble constant in there?

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  • $\begingroup$ Have updated to something very similar to this, thanks! $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Aug 8 '20 at 7:04
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Simple: Get rid of "Was the Hubble constant there?"

It's bad form to ask two questions in one question, which the current title does. Moreover, the Hubble constant is a bit irrelevant at a mere 26 Mpc (the distance used in the paper), so there's no reason to ask about it in the first place.

And no, the Hubble constant was not taken into account.

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  • $\begingroup$ It' not two separate questions, but expanding that to "For example, was $H_0$ involved?" just makes it even longer. I will grant that giving examples within an already long title is suboptimal, but not that "there's no reason to ask in the first place" because not knowing the answer is certainly allowed when posting a question. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Aug 8 '20 at 6:35
  • $\begingroup$ Asking about the error bars is a reasonable question. And it is a good question, all by itself. There's no reason to muddy the waters with a second question, which by now you should know that you shouldn't do no matter what that second question is. If that second question is a good one, ask it as a separate question. Moreover, I'm trying to understand (and failing to understand) why you would think the Hubble constant is applicable. It obviously is not brought into account in the underlying paper. $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    Aug 8 '20 at 6:49
  • $\begingroup$ Anyway it was not a second question, it was part of my question to which I wanted an answer, and now people will know the answer to all of it. As an aside, when someone asks "Need help rewording..." a response along the lines of "Here's something that might be better" is generally better received than "You did something(s) wrong and you should have known better in the first place." $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Aug 8 '20 at 7:03
  • $\begingroup$ I see that you did take my advice and got rid of the auxiliary question in the title, so thanks for that. I have been told multiple times elsewhere that I can sometimes be a bit too blunt at times. On the other hand, I know that you know that asking multiple questions at any Stack Exchange site is considered to be bad form because I've seen you yourself criticize others for asking multiple questions in one original post. $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    Aug 8 '20 at 7:16
  • $\begingroup$ uhoh! It was out for a few seconds but I then added it back in because I really did think it might be used and really did want to know the answer to it, and because with two excellent answers that address it I thought it was historically more accurate to leave it in. I used to work in the semiconductor industry and finding then advertising even the tiniest of inconsistencies was incredibly valuable due to razor thin margins. I was valued for that but I could never figure out why applying it to people in conversation had the opposite effect, until much later :-) $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Aug 8 '20 at 7:21
  • $\begingroup$ I hadn't realize that the fitting analysis of the GW automatically produces a number for the distance and thought that this event had been assigned to a distant galaxy who's distance was estimated using redshift. I'm still plowing through this paper which is hard for me to read, and may ask further questions now that I have some better feel for what's going on. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Aug 8 '20 at 7:22
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    $\begingroup$ The filtering produces a rather large range of numbers for the distance, between 26 Mpc and 48 Mpc (almost a factor of two) in this case. Since the error bars get larger and larger as distance gets smaller and smaller, the authors of the paper in question intentionally used the lower bound on distance. From there, it's a matter of very simple calculations, much simpler than you apparently were thinking. $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    Aug 8 '20 at 7:29
  • $\begingroup$ that's better than it being apparent that I wasn't thinking :-) fyi I've just asked: Why can there be several seconds of lag between a binary neutron start merger and the emission of gamma rays from the same area? $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Aug 8 '20 at 7:45

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