"Let's assume the very first stars formed black holes around 200 million years after the Big Bang," Smethurst says. In fact, collapsed stars grow so slowly, they couldn't possibly become supermassive just by absorbing new material. They are surprisingly inefficient at accreting (physicists' jargon for "sucking up") surrounding material, even in a dense galactic core. In reality, however, black holes don't live up to their monstrous reputation. Mystery solved, one might think – supermassive black holes are simply the hungriest and oldest of their kind. They barrel through the Universe sucking up everything in their path, growing larger and more voracious as they do. In popular culture, black holes are perfectly dark and endlessly hungry. The idea of black holes has been around for a century and is predicted in Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. A dying star runs out of fuel, explodes in a supernova, collapses in on itself, and becomes so dense that even light cannot escape its intense gravity. There's little secret about how conventional – if they can be called that – black holes form and grow. But new techniques that look for the effects supermassive black holes have on the interstellar objects around them, and even at the ripples they create in the fabric of space and time, are providing new clues. Studying something that, by its nature is so dense that even light cannot escape from its centre, makes learning about it difficult. "The prettiest galaxies are the ones that could help us solve the mystery of how these black holes grow." "The ideal galaxies for my study are the most beautiful, perfect spirals you could possibly think of," says Becky Smethurst, a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford who studies supermassive black holes. This is where galaxy UCG 11700 could prove useful. Scientists believe almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart. While standard black holes start at around four times the mass of our Sun, their enormous relatives are millions, and sometimes billions, of times as massive. At the heart of this beautiful cosmic Catherine wheel is one of the most mysterious objects in the Universe – a supermassive black hole. For billions of years, the flocculent spiral arms of galaxy UCG 11700 have wheeled in peace, undisturbed by the collisions and mergers that have deformed so many other galaxies.īut while a spiral galaxy like UCG 11700 is pleasing to look at, something monstrous lurks in its midst. They weren’t the worst kind of sexual offenses.Halfway between the belly of Delphinus the Dolphin and the hind hoof of Pegasus the flying horse, a pristine pinwheel tumbles through space. According to The New York Times, the latter’s top editor Peter Rippon was fired after evidence emerged that he wrote to a reporter, “The girls were teenagers, not too young. While it was BBC One’s Dateline-style Panorama that first made public the accusations (see The Guardian‘s roundup), BBC Two’s investigative show Newsnight had already begun, and then shelved, an inquiry into the alleged abuses. Worse still, it appears some within the BBC were aware of the complaints against their employee. According to Sky News, members of Savile’s family knew about, and were victims of, his abuse. BBC News says he may have found prey at hospitals, too. He allegedly used his position on the two shows to coerce vulnerable girls, and sometimes boys, into having sex with him in and around the publicly funded network’s premises - in dressing rooms, his car, his camper van. According to NPR, “one witness recently told a BBC-TV show saw Glitter having sex with a schoolgirl in Savile’s dressing room at the broadcaster’s TV center in the 1970s.” In an editorial for The Daily Mail, BBC Trust chairman Chris Patten wrote, “The BBC risks squandering public trust because one of its stars over three decades was apparently a sexual criminal … and because others - BBC employees and hangers-on - may also have been involved.”īritish police, who’ve dubbed their investigation into Savile “Operation Yewtree,” have described the once well-loved host as one of the worst sex offenders in recent history. Though Glitter, 68, was released on bail 10 hours later, his arrest could be the first of many to follow. He is accused of sexually abusing approximately 300 children and adolescents during his on-air career. Jimmy Savile, who died last year at 84, hosted Top of the Pops for two decades and had his own children’s show Jim’ll Fix It for nearly as long. Glitter, born Paul Gadd, was best known for the 1972 stadium anthem “Rock and Roll (Part 2),” until his 2006 conviction for molesting two preteen girls in Vietnam. Former pop star Gary Glitter was arrested Sunday in connection with a massive child sex-abuse scandal revolving around a recently deceased BBC television host.
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