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National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

Rotating Dusty Gaseous Donut around an Active Supermassive Black Hole

| Science

The central region of the spiral galaxy M77. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope imaged the distribution of stars. ALMA revealed the distribution of gas in the very center of the galaxy. ALMA imaged a horseshoe-like structure with a radius of 700 light-years and a central compact component with a radius of 20 light-years. The latter is the gaseous torus around the AGN. Red indicates emission from formyl ions (HCO+) and green indicates hydrogen cyanide emission. Download image (3.4 MB)

High resolution observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) imaged a rotating dusty gas torus around an active supermassive black hole. The existence of such rotating donuts-shape structures was first suggested decades ago, but this is the first time one has been confirmed so clearly. This is an important step in understanding the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

These observation results were published as Imanishi et al. “ALMA Reveals an Inhomogeneous Compact Rotating Dense Molecular Torus at the NGC 1068 Nucleus” in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (2018 February 1 issue, 853, L25).

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