Last month a pair of physicists startled the world by claiming that they had managed to see through the Big Bang and glimpse evidence of previous incarnations of the universe in an analysis of radio signals from the sky.

The evidence, said Roger Penrose of Oxford University and Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia, takes the form of concentric rings caused by the collisions of supermassive black holes in earlier versions of our universe and imprinted, like ripples on a pond, on a haze of microwave radiation widely thought to be left over from the Big Bang that started our own cycle of time about 13.7 billion years ago.

Now, however, two other groups of astronomers looking at the same data have concluded that the rings, though real, are part of the current universe we already know and love.

The cosmic microwave background, as it is known, has been much scrutinized since its discovery in 1965 by radio telescopes, balloons and three satellites — NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellites and, most recently, Europe’s Planck satellite — for clues to the origin of the universe. Slight temperature deviations in what is otherwise an exceedingly uniform heat bath are thought to arise from microscopic fluctuations in a force field known as inflation that drove the expansion of the universe when it was but a sliver of a nanosecond old.