In 2023, researchers made plenty of discoveries for the record books — and the history books. This year’s scientific superlatives shed new light on our ancient ancestors, our planet and the animals we share it with.
The Yamnaya people may have been the world’s earliest horseback riders, mounting steeds as far back as 3000 B.C., centuries before the earliest known depictions of horseback riding (SN: 4/8/23, p. 12). Yamnaya skeletons unearthed in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary show telltale signs of horsemanship, including marks on the femur and pelvis that could come from sitting astride and vertebral damage from falling off.
Visitors to the Altiplano plateau in Chile’s Atacama Desert should be sure to pack sunscreen. This high-altitude region gets hit with an average of 308 watts of sunshine per square meter — the most intense sunlight anywhere on Earth (SN: 8/26/23, p. 5). Sometimes, solar radiation exceeds 2,000 watts per square meter, rivaling the amount of sunshine expected to beat down on Venus, which is much closer to the sun than Earth is.
A supermassive black hole some 13.2 billion light-years from Earth is the most distant, most ancient supermassive black hole ever observed. The monster dates to when the universe was just 470 million years old, making it about 200 million years older than a record breaker announced in 2021 and 100 million years older than a black hole that claimed the title in July (SN: 12/18/21 & 1/1/22, p. 29). Because the newfound black hole boasts about the same heft as its surrounding galaxy, researchers think the black hole could have formed only through the collapse of a massive gas cloud. The finding could help shed light on how the universe’s first generation of juggernaut black holes were born.
2023-12-21 11:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org