They did it with nowhere near the fanfare of their first announcement, but scientists who last year announced they had proven the “Big Bang” theory for the universe have now admitted they were wrong.

Last March, astronomers using the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole claimed they had found “primordial gravitational waves” that proved the Big Bang.   They called the evidence the “smoking gun” that disproved the Biblical account of creation.

A year after calling it a “genuine breakthrough” and something that would “represent a new era in cosmology and physics”, researcher Jean-Loup Puget confirmed the lack of proof.

“Unfortunately, we have not been able to confirm that the signal is an imprint of cosmic inflation,” Puget said in the statement.

“We are effectively retracting the claim,” BICEP2 researcher Brian Keating told the Associated Press.

“It is the announcement no one wanted to hear,” Space.com reported. “The most exciting astronomical discovery of 2014 has vanished. Two groups of scientists announced today that a tantalizing signal—which some scientists claimed was ‘smoking gun’ evidence of dramatic cosmic expansion just after the birth of the universe—was actually caused by something much more mundane: interstellar dust.”