The Scientists Who 'Proved' The Big Bang Theory True Admits They May Be Wrong

The team of astrophysicists that claimed to have found proof of the Big Bang theory a few months ago has now admitted that they may have spoken too soon.

Yahoo! News reports that last March, the American team led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that they had discovered the gravitational waves in space that Albert Einstein said would confirm how the universe formed.

The team's conclusion was immediately criticized, however, and they have avoided media scrutiny ever since.

The scientists, who go by the name BICEP after the telescope they used, published their findings on Thursday in the journal Physical Review Letters.

They wrote that the waves they thought they were seeing may have just been dust from the Milky Way galaxy.

The conclusion states that their models "are not sufficiently constrained by external public data to exclude the possibility of dust emission bright enough to explain the entire excess signal."

The findings were based around small fluctuations in cosmic microwaves that were supposedly left over from the Big Bang.

Many other scientists found it difficult to support this connection, as the corkscrew pattern of waves could have also been produced by light from galactic dust.

Princeton University theoretical astrophysicist David Spergel noted last week how difficult it would be to tell the waves and dust apart.

We know that galactic dust emits polarized radiations. We see that in many areas of the sky, and what we pointed out in our paper is that pattern they have seen is just as consistent with the galactic dust radiations as with gravitational waves.

Though Kovac and his colleagues wrote that they found little to no polarized dust in the area of the sky they were looking at, the satellite-crafted dust map they relied upon to prove this was never widely accepted and thus could be significantly flawed.

The presence of dust will be validated in the coming months when another team, working with the competing European Space Agency, publishes its results after studying a much larger part of the sky.

Their measurements will be tested in six frequencies compared to the BICEP's one.

Kovac's team is still insisting that the gravitational waves were the source of the changes in the cosmic background, as just about all theoretical models have suggested that there couldn't have been enough dust in the sky to mimic the phenomenon.

The team is also in talks with their competitors to begin a more thorough study of the dust.

H/T: Yahoo News, Photo Credit: Getty Images