Scientists will have to wait a while longer to find out what kicked off the Big Bang.
Last spring, a team of astronomers who go by the name of Bicep announced that they had detected ripples in space-time, or gravitational waves, reverberating from the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of time — long-sought evidence that the expansion of the universe had started out with a giant whoosh called inflation.
The discovery was heralded as potentially the greatest of the new century, but after months of spirited debate, the group conceded that the result could have been caused by interstellar dust, a notion buttressed by subsequent measurements by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite that the part of the sky Bicep examined was in fact dusty.
Now a new analysis, undertaken jointly by the Bicep group and the Planck group, has confirmed that the Bicep signal was mostly, if not all, stardust, and that there is no convincing evidence of the gravitational waves. No evidence of inflation.
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Max Tegmark, an M.I.T. expert on the cosmic microwaves, said, “It’s important to remember that inflation is still alive and well, and that many of the simplest models predict signals just below this new limit.” The next few years will be interesting, he said.
Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said he could appreciate the frustration of his colleagues, who have been wandering in the wilderness for nearly four decades looking for clues to the Beginning.
“Inflation is the most important idea in cosmology since the hot Big Bang,” he said. “It is our Helen of Troy, launching a thousand experiments.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 31, 2015, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Speck of Interstellar Dust Obscures Glimpse of Big Bang. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
