Universe is actually stranger than fiction

Galactic center of the Milky Way from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Photo courtesy NASA/JPL

Science fiction, that is. Scientists revealed last week that there are more strange things in the universe than most had supposed even as recently as five years ago. At last week's annual meeting of U.S. astronomers, research findings were announced that described such oddities as “rogue” black holes that wander the Milky Way galaxy.

As mentioned in an Associated Press article on the Earthlink News website,  scientists describe “baby blue dwarfs” and a giant glob of “dark matter” in a supercluster of galaxies, with forces so great that they have had to invent a new vocabulary to describe the kind of violent behavior associated with these cramped-together galaxies. They refer to such terms as “slow strangulation” and “stripping” as events that unfold when these galaxies collide.

Other phenomena include a massive gas cloud 1 million times as massive as the Sun that is rushing toward the Milky Way at a high rate of speed. of course, since it is 47 quadrillion miles away, the collision with our galaxy won't happen for a another 40 million years.