From Earth, you might think the Milky Way is peaceful and rather boring. Other galaxies collide, explode, or rip themselves apart, while ours seems to rotate in an orderly, unchanging spiral. But Antony Stark of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggests we are simply enjoying a calm between galactic storms. In the next 10 million years a cataclysm at the center of the Milky Way will destroy old stars, birth new ones, and sterilize a swath of space thousands of light-years wide.
The cause of this impending conflagration, according to Stark’s analysis, is the massive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, which is steadily pulling a tide of stars and gas inward. A ring of galactic flotsam is building up there in an elongated oval, like the rings that encircle Saturn. “As more and more material piles on, it will coagulate in two lumps, as if Saturn’s ...
