We start the year with our planet reaching perihelion - closest point to the Sun - which will happen at 22:49 UTC on January 2. At the time, Earth will be 146.6 million km (91 million miles) from the Sun. 

The first meteor shower of the year - Quadrantids - will reach the maximum rate of activity on the morning of January 4. However, some shooting stars will be visible each night from January 1 to 6. The Moon will be 24 days old at the time of peak activity, and so will present minimal interference.

The best time of the month to observe faint objects such as galaxies and star clusters because there is no moonlight to interfere - New Moon - is scheduled for the night of January 10.

Full Moon is scheduled for January 24. 

• January 2 - Earth at perihelion - 22:49 UTC.  The Earth's annual orbit around the Solar System will carry us to our closest point to the Sun, at a distance of 0.98 AU (146.6 million km / 91 million miles)...

A new research, conducted by scientists of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, suggests that Earth is surrounded by long, 'hairy' filaments of dark matter. Theoretically, the hairy filaments, if detected could be used to map out the inner layers of any planet or space bodies, NASA announced on November 23, 2015.

Dark matter, is believed to be an invisible substance making up approximately 27% of all matter and energy of the universe. Regular matter, or 'visible' builds up only 5% of the universe. According to experts, the rest of the universe building blocks is made of dark energy which is associated with acceleration of our expanding universe.

So far, no experiments have been able to detect dark matter or dark energy, however scientist are confident in its existence, based on observations of its gravitational pull in action, and they have also been able to measure how much of it is our there to the accuracy of 1%.

Illustration showing Earth surrounded by...

The ThunderBolts started a series of reports on groundbreaking scientific data from the ESA Rosetta mission to Comet 67P.

In previous Space News', Dr. Franklin Anariba, a lecturer at Singapore University of Technology and Design, has presented a scientific argument for electrochemical processes on comets.

Dr. Anariba begins his analysis of recently published scientific papers, which provide perhaps the best direct evidence to date of the electrical nature of cometary activity.

Astronomers have spotted a dwarf planet which is three times farther away than Pluto. This makes it the farthest object discovered in the Solar System. Once its orbit is ascertained, planetoid V774104 may teach researchers a lot about the early Solar System.

The researchers, led by Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C, used Japan’s 8-meter Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to detect the dwarf planet. This discovery was then announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on November 10, 2015. Most searches involving distant objects tend to focus on the Solar System's plane. However, in this case, researchers focused on that region of the sky which was an average of 15° away from the ecliptic.

The discovered planetoid has been named V774104 and is between 500 and 1000 kilometers (310 to 621 miles) across. The dwarf planet lies 15.4 billion kilometers (9.56 billion miles) from the Sun, or 103 astronomical units (AU) away. One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the precise distance between the Earth and our sun.