杏吧原创

REALLY, it won鈥檛 taste good. We have for the first time imaged one of the doughnuts of dust long thought to encircle some supermassive black holes.

The black hole at the centre of an active galaxy feeds on a circling disc of gas. This disc can be bright enough to outshine the entire galaxy, but some seem to be obscured by a 鈥渢orus鈥� of dust.

Santiago Garcia-Burillo of Spain鈥檚 Madrid Observatory and his colleagues have used a radio telescope array in Chile to image the torus of NGC 1068, a galaxy 50 million light years away. Although it is among the brightest and nearest active galaxies, its torus still appeared tens of thousands of times smaller than the moon ().

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淒oughnut seen circling black hole鈥�