PSJC #164 April 4 2014

various

Recent News: New Detached Object, Asteroidal Rings, CMB Polarization

We will discuss very recent items that have been in the news lately, to wit:

• Newly discovered detached object 2012 VP113, found by Sheppard and Trujillo and announced in a MPEC. Its perihelion distance is about 80 AU.
• Chariklo's newly found rings, which were reported by Braga-Ribas et al. in a Nature paper.
• The announcement regarding polarization structure in the CMB reported by the BICEP2 collaboration. They have a preprint on arXiv. The result is a claimed ``smoking-gun" for cosmological inflation.