It is only a little bit scary but it's here in time for Halloween. A 400-metre-wide asteroid that scientists only spotted three weeks ago is going to shoot past Earth at 35 kilometres a second.

Rings have been discovered by chance around the distant icy asteroid Chariklo which orbits between Saturn and Uranus. A discovery which makes Chariklo a unique object, and which opens up a new area in the study of small bodies in the solar system.

At the end of 2013, telescopes around the world were focused on Ison, a comet that should have been the comet of the decade. TRAPPIST, the telescope at the University of Liège, was among the best placed to observe this new visitor.

In November 2010, the dwarf planet Eris passed in front of a faint star in the Cetus constellation. The observations of this occultation with, among others, the Liège robotic telescope TRAPPIST gave unexpected and important results.

ULiège is the first francophone Belgian university to equip itself with a robotic telescope. Responding to the effervescent name of TRAPPIST, it will scan the starry skies of Chile in the search for exoplanets and comets.