Space

Heads up! The solar system comet 24P/Schaumasse will make its closest approach to the sun in its current orbit on Jan. 8 during an event known to astronomers as perihelion. Here’s what to expect from the icy wanderer as it reaches peak visibility over the coming days. The short-period comet was discovered by astronomer Alexandre Schaumasse in December 1911 using a 16-inch (400 mm) telescope…

I should probably start with a confession for someone who writes about the night sky almost every day: until recently, I had never actually seen the Milky Way properly. Not as a bright, structured band stretching across the sky. Not in a way that made me stop and stare. I knew my home skies in central England were light-polluted. I also thought I had experienced reasonably dark skies before…

From orbit, Earth often looks more like art than geography. Satellites such as the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel missions are designed to turn that beauty into information. Rather than taking only “normal” photographs, the Sentinel-2 satellites record Earth in multiple wavelengths of light, including bands beyond human vision. Scientists then combine those wavelengths into…

RNA, which is one of life’s most crucial molecules dealing with the synthesis of proteins, could be common in the universe, according to a new experiment that shows how RNA could easily have formed on Earth 4.3 billion years ago. RNA (short for ribonucleic acid) is a simpler cousin of DNA, which is the molecule that contains the genetic information for our cellular biology. RNA comes in a…