Stardust got in their eyes. In the spring a group of astronomers who go by the name of BICEP announced they had detected ripples in the sky, gravitational waves that were the opening notes of the Big Bang. The finding was heralded as potentially the greatest discovery of the admittedly young century, but some outside astronomers said the group had underestimated the extent to which interstellar dust could have contaminated the results - a possibility that the group conceded in its official report in June. Now a long-awaited report by astronomers using data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite...