We live in a Universe full of galaxies, supermassive black holes, and violence. The violence is particularly relevant here, because every so often, these galaxies merge, and if they each contain a supermassive black hole, the gravitational wave "ripples" that get sent through space will literally shake and affect everything that's in them.
"As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d stay away." -Hughes Mearns
Although every week at Starts With A Bang is special, there's something extra special brewing here. Sure, we've got the "normal stuff" of the articles we've written:
"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -Omar N. Bradley
There are some words that, seemingly, you can't utter without inflaming people's passions in one way or another, and nuclear seems to fall squarely in that category. This week, we touched on a number of remarkable topics over on Starts With A Bang, including:
"Not even light can escape such hollowing, this huge mass in a small space. Even the Milky Way with its open arms is said to have a black hole at its heart." -Susan B.A. Somers-Willett
Our Milky Way is home to us all. With its hundreds of billions of stars, massive spiral arms, dust lanes, and orbiting globular clusters, it's no wonder that nearly everything we see in the night sky is contained within it.
Some dead stars may harbor enough uranium to set off a thermonuclear bomb sciencemag.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sciencemag.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.