Last Year's Biggest Physics Discovery Falls Flat as Cosmologists Mistook Dust for Gravity

One of the most celebrated physics discoveries of last year has just fallen to dust, literally.

According to Scientific American, the widely reported discovery of primordial gravitation waves that were a consequence of Universe's inflation immediately after the Big Bang, never actually took place. The discovery was announced on the basis of a unique pattern of radiation in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that was then attributable to gravitational waves which was later overturned. Researchers who made the discovery were misled by cosmic dust that is known to produce patterns similar to gravitational waves.

Last year's discovery in March was made by researchers working with BICEP2 telescope located near the South Pole. Researchers had used best available maps of cosmic dust to negate its presence from observations of CMB. Finding patterns that are said to be associated with primordial gravitational waves after negating dust with the maps, they announced their discovery Discover Magazine reported.

However, when European Space Agency's space-floating Planck telescope conveyed its findings on dust, the discovery was overturned; Planck's findings matched perfectly with those of BICEP2 when superimposed, proving that BICEP2 researchers had mistaken dust for gravitational waves.

The elusive primordial gravitational waves, if sighted, are direct evidence for the Universe Inflation Theory which claims that the Universe expanded faster than it ever did or ever will, immediately after the Big Bang. The theory is usually assumed to hold true as it explains many things in cosmological but direct evidence validating it is yet to be found, The Economist reports.