Scientists who claimed last year to have found a pattern in the sky left by the super-rapid expansion of space just fractions of a second after the Big Bang were mistaken.
The signal had been confounded by light emission from dust in our own galaxy.
This is the conclusion of a new study involving the US-led BICEP2 team itself.
A paper describing the findings has been submitted to the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters.
A summary was briefly posted on an official French website on Friday before being pulled. A press release was then issued later in the day, although the paper itself is still not in the public domain at the time of writing.
A determination that BICEP2 was mistaken in its observations is not a major surprise.
The team itself had already made known its reduced confidence in the detection. But the new paper is significant because it is co-authored by "rival" scientists. These are the Planck Consortium of researchers, who were operating a European Space Agency (Esa) satellite that had also been seeking the same expansion pattern.
It was on the website of one of this satellite's instrument teams - its High Frequency Instrument (HFI) - that the outcome of the joint assessment was briefly leaked on Friday.
All the unified effort can do, according to the Esa press release, is put an upper limit on the likely size of the real signal.
This will be important for those future experiments that endeavour to make what would still be one of the great discoveries in modern science.