We watch football and stock car racing. Even in real life, we find it impossible to drive by a serious accident without slowing down to look.
Astronomers see violence on a, well, astronomical scale.
We've known for a generation just how violent a place the Universe is. Before that, we had known about novas, stars that blow off their outer shells, and supernovas, stars that simply blow up, leaving only a core behind. Those cores are neutron stars which, when they are oriented just so, are also the pulsars that so excited the world when they were discovered in 1967. We know that galaxies really do collide, setting off pyrotechnic displays of new, hot stars that form as the gases in those galaxies are compressed. They probably are black holes at the centers of galaxies, pulling in the interstellar gas as well as the stars around them, ripping them apart in the process.