But a new model based on measurements of the magnetic field associated with these jets offers possible insight into the amount of rotational energy lost by the black hole as it shoots these beams out into space. The mechanism behind launching these jets, and even the material that makes up the jets, is still poorly understood. Many AGN - and their smaller, stellar-mass counterparts - are associated with jets of material spewing along their rotational axes. With the high resolution of ALMA, now we can directly see the structure.” “However, the dusty gaseous donut is very tiny in appearance. “To interpret various observational features of AGNs, astronomers have assumed rotating donut-like structures of dusty gas around active supermassive black holes,” said Masatoshi Imanishi of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and lead author of the paper, in a press release. The work was published February 1 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Using ALMA, they were able to identify emission from hydrogen cyanide molecules (HCN) and formyl ions (HCO+) associated with the gas and dust in the center of the galaxy around the black hole, zeroing in on a dense “donut” of material rotating around the central object.

Their target was the center of the spiral galaxy M77, which lies 47 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus. Now, using the resolution afforded by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have clearly imaged for the first time the rotation of a dusty torus around a supermassive black hole. Part of this structure is a dusty, donut-shaped torus of material - gas and dust - around the black hole, shrouding part or all of it from view, depending on its orientation. It’s believed this structure and its orientation affect what we see, which is why not all AGN look the same. Astronomers use the “unified model” of AGN to describe the structure around a feeding black hole.

Super masive blackhole