How hard is it to find a comet?

Thirty years ago, on the evening of 23 July 1995, amateur astronomers Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp were both independently looking at the same globular star cluster. Experienced observers who knew the sk

What would you say if intelligent aliens came calling?

Ten years ago, Pluto emerged from the gloom at the Solar System’s ragged edge – and a new world came in from the cold. Five billion kilometres (3 billion miles) from Earth, on 14 July 2015, NASA’s pia

Where did life on Earth begin? That sounds like a relatively straightforward question. Surely life on Earth began… well, on Earth, right? We know this planet had the right conditions for life to arise

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