Two New Discoveries in the Solar System

There's not too much to say about these. The first one is an asteroid that has been discovered to have it's own rings. This is the first asteroid we have found that has its own ring system.

BBC News
Nature


The second one is a new dwarf planet that has been discovered outside of Pluto's orbit. There's two main theories on its formation, but it has still yet to be officially confirmed.

BBC News
Nature

Cosmic Waves of Discovery

Summary: Scientists at the BICEP2 collaboration at the South Pole have detected signal that confirm theories of the rapid expansion of the universe immediately after the big bang. If validated by other experiments (which is likely to happen as the signal found is actually stronger than predicted) this confirms a super-rapid expansion within the first instants of the universe before "slowing down" to rapid expansion. What they found were twists in Cosmic Radiation Background that could have only been produced by gravitational waves.

So what does this mean? These signals tell astronomers that gravity was present during this time in which quantum effects dominated the, then very tiny, universe. This gives us greater hope that the Four Fundamental Forces can be one day combined into a unified Theory of Everything which could better describe conditions at the big bang.


BBC News
Minute Physics video explaining the discovery
Discussion on background and implications
Video of the founding scientists hearing the news
SciShow