This Just In

"Black hole rips star apart," whispered the headline in the back pages of the local newspaper. The star was about the size of our sun, 700 million light years from here. "Stars can survive being stretched a small amount," said a researcher. I'm not sure what qualifies as small in astronomical terms, but obviously this was quite a stretch. On the other hand, the lead story on the front page was about pot holes in our city's streets. The opening sentence? "The worst is yet to come." Proximity is everything, even if objects heard by radiotelescopes may be closer than they appear.