Thanks for the ideas; I like the idea of the asteroid whipping around the sun so fast that it bends time and space when hitting Earth. Maybe the cause for this could be something supernatural, like a living black hole or such, or maybe something very banal, like a slight shift in the Moon's...
The origin of the universe for an upcoming story I have planned hinges around an idea where, when the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit Earth, instead of wiping out the dinosaurs, it opened up a portal that deposited them in another part of the galaxy. Now, this is of course most assuredly...
I always figured that the super-massive black hole(s) provided an axis around which material spins, with layers of gravitational spreading out until the very edge of galaxy. Basically, large amounts of stuff orbit the black hole, which in turn pulls in other stuff around the ring it forms, and...