| | | October 12 Top Stories This Week | | | |
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 | | | 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. | | | | | | | | 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. | | | | | | | |
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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. | | | | | |
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 | | | 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. | | |
