Oct 12 - Top Stories This Week

October 12 Top Stories This Week by:

Human population growth from 1800 to 2000, via Wikimedia Commons.

EarthSky News will be taking Sunday and Monday off … see you Tuesday! It's been 20 years since the Day of 6 Billion Our global human population was estimated to reach 6 billion on today's date in 1999. Eleven years later, in 2011, Earth had gained another billion people. Today - October 12, 2019 - it stands at about 7.7 billion, according to United Nations estimates. Read more. Saturn is our solar system's new moon king Astronomers have found 20 new moons orbiting Saturn, bringing the planet's total number of moons to 82. That surpasses Jupiter, which has 79. Read more, watch a video, and help name the new moons. The violent history of Andromeda, the big galaxy next door "The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in about 4 billion years. So knowing what kind of a monster our galaxy is up against is useful in finding out the Milky Way's ultimate fate." Read more. Cosmic web fuels stars and supermassive black holes Astronomers probed the cosmic web, a large-scale structure composed of massive filaments of galaxies separated by giant voids. They found the filaments also contained significant amounts of gas, believed to help fuel the galaxies’ growth. Read more. More top stories Watch for this weekend's full Hunter's Moon 'Impossible' exoplanet and an alternate planet-formation theory 10 amazing places for year-round stargazing Not long ago, the center of our Milky Way galaxy exploded The last woolly mammoths died on a remote island Curiosity finds an ancient oasis on Mars

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All you need to know: 2019's Hunter's Moon Here in the Northern Hemisphere, because it's autumn now, the ecliptic - or sun and moon's path - makes its narrowest angle with your horizon in early evening. Image via ClassicalAstronomy.com. Read more about this weekend's Hunter's Moon.

All you need to know: 2019's Hunter's Moon When the angle of the ecliptic is narrow, the moon rises noticeably farther north on your horizon from one night to the next. So there's no long period of darkness between sunset and moonrise. In other words, around the time of an autumn full moon, many people see the rising moon ascending in the eastern sky in twilight, for several evenings in a row. The precise time of this full moon is Sunday, October 13, at 21:08 UTC; translate UTC to your time. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, your evening ecliptic is nearly perpendicular to your early evening horizon now. You'll see the full moon rise in twilight, but the next night's moon come up in darkness, much later at night. Image via ClassicalAstronomy.com. Read more about this weekend's Hunter's Moon.  Submit your photo to EarthSky here! Did a friend forward EarthSkyNews to you? Click here to get your own subscription!

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