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Dusty doughnut around massive black hole spied for first time
25 April 2016
A team of astronomers, including UCL's Prof. Serena Viti imaged for the first time one of the doughnuts of dust long thought to encircle some supermassive black holes. These supermassive black holes are believed to be obscured by a doughnut-shaped structure of dust and gas, called a "torus." However because the centres of these active galaxies are so distant, a dusty torus has never been seen - until now!
A dusty doughnut might look like this
A dusty doughnut might look like this
The discovery required 35 radio dishes on the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) perched in the high desert of the Chilean Andes.
If you want to know more about this amazing dougnut see
and
http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00205
. . . It won't taste very good!