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The sun sets behind BICEP2, in the foreground, and the South Pole Telescope, in the background. (Steffen Richter/VagabondPix.com)

A new analysis has dynamited a much-hyped discovery of “gravitational waves” from the dawn of time. What had seemed to be a major breakthrough in cosmology, one that incited loose talk of Nobel prizes, now appears to have been a case of scientists over-interpreting their data.

Last March, in a highly anticipated news conference at Harvard, scientists with an experiment called BICEP2 revealed that their South Pole telescope had scanned the background radiation of the universe and made a dazzling discovery: The ancient light had apparently been polarized by gravitational waves emitted in the initial moment after the Big Bang, when the tiny, dense universe expanded violently.

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