In the mid-1980s, astronomers came to the conclusion that supermassive black holes were covered by dense donut-shaped clouds of dust and gas that fueled their insatiable hunger for matter, and they gave it the scientific name of torus or torus . These are actually lumpy bagels and not as perfect as the buns you can buy at the grocery store or supermarket . Their presence would explain why some of these massive gravitational fields, located in the center of galaxies, remain hidden, their characteristic radiation emissions cannot be detected.
Now, for the first time, scientists have had the opportunity to directly examine the donut of a black hole , thanks to the power of the radio telescopes of the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA), in the Atacama desert (Chile). A team led by Santiago García-Burillo, from the National Astronomical Observatory (Madrid), pointed to a place already tracked previously: the heart of the galaxy NGC 1086, which is located 50 million light years away. Although it is one of the brightest, closest and most active galaxies, the donut appears thousands of times smaller than the Moon.
Apart from being a demonstration of the power of ALMA, this direct observation of the emission of dust and the molecular distribution of concentrated gases around the massive black hole will help to find out why and how the so-called Active Nuclei of Galaxies (AGN, for its acronym in English) and what is the cause of these disks of matter are not uniform.
