Impending Galactic Crash Could Rip Open the Black Hole at the Milky Way’s Center

According to a new paper published Jan. 4 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, our home galaxy appears to be on a crash course with one of its nearest satellites, the spiral of stars known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

This cosmic crash, modeled in lovely and terrifying detail by a team of astrophysicists at Durham University in the U.K., could begin as soon as 2 billion years from now — roughly 2 billion to 3 billion years sooner than the long-anticipated collision between the Milky Way and its nearest cosmic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. (Adjust your doomsday clocks accordingly.)

While the LMC boasts only about one-twentieth the solar mass of the Milky Way, the collision would nevertheless leave permanent scars on both galaxies, igniting once-dormant black holes, flinging stars quadrillions of miles out of orbit and staining the sky with crackling cosmic radiation.

"The destruction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, as it is devoured by the Milky Way, will wreak havoc with our galaxy," Marius Cautun, lead study author and postdoctoral fellow in Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, said in a statement.

https://www.livescience.com/64433-milky-way-large-magellanic-cloud-collision-imminent.html

R Kelly and his camp have reportedly created a Facebook page and website to discredit the women who appeared in the recent Lifetime series Surviving R Kelly according to TMZ.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6566331/R-Kelly-allegedly-posts-sex-tapes-accuser-site-launched-camp-discredit-women.html

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART): Hitting an Asteroid Head On

DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impact technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space. The DART mission is in Phase B, led by JHU/APL and managed by the Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory http://dart.jhuapl.edu/