Scientists tell us there are supermassive black holes at the heart of nearly every galaxy. Ranging from a million to a billion times the mass of our Sun, they consume everything around them. When this process goes too quickly, it "clogs the pipeline" (like stuffing one's mouth with more food than one can swallow). This results in the  glow of various wavelengths of radiation, visible from millions, and even billions of light years away.

Objects swallowed up by these monsters don’t go quietly; on the contrary, all of us might actually hear them in space soon.

These death screams will be recorded by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) which is scheduled for launch in 2015. This will consist of  three identical spacecrafts flying in triangular formation five million kilometers (about three million miles) apart.

As compact objects are consumed by the supermassive black hole, the enormous energies involved will send powerful gravity waves rippling across space.  As these strike the LISA spacecraft, the distance between them will  expand and contract slightly. LISA should be able to detect these changes, as well as the direction from where they originated.

Large supermassive black holes consumed all the compact objects in their vicinity long ago. Smaller black holes, however could still be surrounded by even smaller black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, so their collisions should be more frequently detected.