Scientists who made headlines in March last year by announcing that they had found long-sought evidence about the early universe are now abandoning that claim.
New data show that their cosmic observations no longer back up that conclusion, they say.
The original announcement caused a sensation because it appeared to show evidence that the universe ballooned rapidly a split-second after its birth, in what scientist call cosmic inflation.
That idea had been widely believed, but researchers had hoped to bolster it by finding a particular trait in light left over from the very early universe.
That signal is what the researchers thought they had found in observations of the sky taken from the South Pole, in a project called BICEP2.
Now, in a new paper submitted for publication, “we are effectively retracting the claim,” said BICEP2 team member Brian Keating of the University of California, San Diego.
“It’s disappointing,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday after the European Space Agency publicized the results. “It’s like finding out there’s no Santa Claus, but it’s important to know the truth.”
The new analysis was conducted by BICEP2 researchers and scientists who worked with the European Planck satellite, which provided new data to help interpret the original observations.
In essence, the analysis shows that the source of the signal observed by BICEP2 is not necessarily the very early universe, Keating said.
Instead, it is equally likely to have come from dust in the Milky Way galaxy, which would mean that it does not provide the evidence BICEP2 interpreted.
That possibility had been raised by other scientists soon after the announcement in March last year.
When the BICEP2 team published its results in June last year, it acknowledged that it might have been fooled by the dust, but stood by its initial conclusions.
Keating said the search for a signal from the early universe would continue, adding that the new analysis has helped by showing how to avoid being misled by the galactic dust.
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