Planck spacecraft shows no evidence to support BICEP2 results

New data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite spell more trouble for the claimed discovery of ripples in the fabric of space created moments after the Big Bang. The Planck data strongly suggest that dust in the Milky Way galaxy might account for the entire signal interpreted as gravitational waves by researchers using BICEP2, the Antarctic telescope responsible for the initial discovery, which was announced in March.

If the BICEP2 observations hold up, they would be the first direct peek at the long-hypothesized epoch of inflation, a period of explosive cosmic expansion that followed the birth of the universe