Asteroid 2004 BL86 skims past Earth at a distance of just three times the Moon on the evening of 26th January. When best placed, it will become bright enough to see from the UK with small telescopes or large binoculars. Here’s our hour-by-hour observing guide.

Detection of a small boulder-size asteroid hurtling toward Earth 2 June served as a real-world test of the advance warning systems in place to find, track and characterise potentially threatening bodies.

Japan launched a pioneering observatory with X-ray vision Wednesday to peer into the mysterious, light-starved neighbourhoods around black holes and study the genesis of galaxies and other cosmic mega-structures billions of light-years from Earth.