Discovery of Big Bang's Gravitational Waves Goes Bust, Due to Dust
A leaked analysis suggests that findings of gravitational waves from the big bang were illusory.
Back to the drawing board for how the big bang first went bang. Intergalactic dust has doomed last year's celebrated observations of gravitational ripples from the first moments of creation, according to astrophysics results leaked on Friday.
The BICEP2 scientific team announced evidence last March that surprisingly strong gravitational waves rippled through the big bang's fiery aftermath, called the cosmic microwave background. That seemed to confirm that the cosmos grew to a stunningly vast size in its very first moments some 13.8 billion years ago.
But the Friday leak of the European Space Agency's Planck satellite report, made in collaboration with the BICEP2 team, suggests that the signal was essentially an optical illusion. Intervening, obscuring dust lingering in our own
