Scientists are abandoning claims, made in March, that they had discovered direct evidence to support the Big Bang theory.

According to the Associated Press, astronomers who have named themselves BICEP thought they had found evidence that the universe ballooned rapidly, a fraction of a second after its birth, in a phenomenon known as “cosmic inflation.” However, the European Space Agency released a Jan. 30 announcement stating that a joint analysis of information from their Planck satellite, Bicep2 and Keck Array tests has found no definite proof of primordial gravitational waves.

BICEP announced that they had detected ripples in space-time reverberating from the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of time. Such evidence had been long sought by the scientific community and its discovery was heralded as potentially the greatest of the 21st century.

Subsequent measurements by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, however, showed the part of the sky BICEP examined was covered with interstellar dust. Scientists had been debating the veracity of BICEP’s findings before this, and the group had already conceded that their result may have been caused by stardust.

Now a joint analysis by the BICEP and Planck groups has confirmed the BICEP signal to be mostly stardust. The study found no credible evidence of gravitational waves or inflation.

“This analysis shows that the amount of gravitational waves can probably be no more than about half the observed signal,” said Clem Pryke of the University of Minnesota in an interview on Friday.

“We can’t say with any certainty whether any gravity wave signals remain,” Pryke continued. “Obviously, we’re not exactly thrilled, but we are scientists and our job is to try and uncover the truth. In the scientific process, the truth will emerge.”

The analysis was led by Pryke one of four principal investigators for BICEP. Brendan Crill acted as a liaison between the groups. He is a Planck member from the California Institute of Technology.

Their report was to have been posted on Monday but it accidentally went up earlier. It was taken down amid hasty news stories. A paper is to be posted to the BICEP website and has been submitted to the Physical Review Letters.

The analysis will be far from final Several experiments devoted tto finding the answers are underway. At stake is a theory proposed by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. Inflation theory holds that the universe underwent a brief, violent expansion in the earliest moments. This would explain why the universe looks uniform and where galaxies come from – quantum dents in the inflating cosmos.

An explosion of that kind would have left faint B-modes, corkscrew patterns, in the pattern of polarization of the microwaves. Interstellar dust has a similar effect.

BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic  Polarization) is led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Jamie Bock of Caltech; Pryke and Chao-Lin Kuo of Stanford. The second of their radio telescopes deployed at the South Pole, BICEP2, detected a signal strength in the sweet spot for popular inflation models.

But that result was contrary to a limit on the strength of gravitational waves previously obtained by the Planck satellite, which has nine frequencies to BICEP2’s one. BICEP only gained access to Planck data once the groups decided to work together.