A group of astronomers who announced in March that they had detected space-time disturbances — gravitational waves — from the beginning of the Big Bang reaffirmed their claim on Thursday but conceded that dust from the Milky Way galaxy might have interfered with their observations.

The original announcement, heralding what the astronomers said could be “a new era” in cosmology, astounded and exhilarated scientists around the world. At a splashy news conference on March 17 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., the talk quickly turned to multiple universes and Nobel Prizes.

But even as reporters and scientists were gathering there, others convened on Facebook and elsewhere to pick apart the findings. What ensued was a rare example of the scientific process — sharp elbows, egos and all — that played out the last three months.

If the findings are indeed true, the detection of those gravitational waves would confirm a theory that the universe began with a violent outward antigravitational swoosh known as inflation — a notion that would explain the uniformity of the heavens, among other mysteries, and put physicists in touch with quantum forces that prevailed when the universe was only a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. The idea once seemed like science fiction, but the astronomers’ findings put it almost in reach.