GALACTIC TSUNAMI

By: David L. Souers

Chapter 3

The Wave

Traveling outward from the horrific maelstrom at the center of the galaxy, the wave was over one hundred thousand years old as it traversed the spiral arm of the Milky Way that mankind called home. A huge expanding bubble of electro-magnetic energy, it would continue it’s progress until it eventually exited the galaxy and continued it’s journey into intergalactic space, as thousands of waves had done in the past, and evidently, would continue to do into the future.

The source of this immense power plant was a black hole at the center of the milky way, who’s dimensions were so mind boggling that the average person couldn’t even begin to visualize it’s size or power. It was equal to three million times the mass of our puny sun, but it had been squeezed down to a size that was not much bigger that your average star. Many scientists believed that the Milky Way, and most of the other galaxies in the universe for that matter, had their beginnings when the, “fossil quasar”, black holes from the distant past gathered matter into themselves. These ancient singularities were the attractants that drew the loose matter into accretion discs that eventually formed nearly all of the modern day galaxies. When astronomers had finally figured out that remnants of the age of the quasars from ten billion years in the past were what controlled today’s universe, they began to look closer at our neighboring galaxies, and much to their amazement, found that every one of the spiral and elliptical galaxies had a super-massive black hole residing in it’s heart. When you stop to consider that one teaspoonful of this entity would weigh as much as a good sized mountain on our planet, and what that kind of gravitational force could do, you can then understand why anything that approaches it, begins to spiral downward towards the event horizon. Be it a star that is literally being ripped in half, as the side closest to the monster is devoured first, dust clouds measuring light years across that are streaming inward, or stray photons plunging into oblivion, the unrelenting process will continue until nothing is left to be consumed. Faster and faster the death spiral continues until the gravitational forces involved, rip the very molecules apart, and there is nothing left of any of it but a shower of subatomic particles passing the event horizon. This process releases tremendous amounts of energy that accumulates in the swirling flux until further containment becomes impossible, and with a blinding flash the next wave expands outward at the speed of light.