Cosmic dust proves prevalent

Space dust accounts for at least some of the possible signal of cosmic inflation the BICEP2 experiment announced in March. How much remains to be seen. Space is full of dust, according to a new analysis from the European Space Agency’s Planck experiment. That includes the area of space studied by the BICEP2 experiment, which in March announced seeing a faint pattern left over from the big bang that could tell us about the first moments after the birth of the universe. The Planck analysis, whic...