Georgia State’s CHARA Array Detects Elusive, Dusty Inner Region of Distant Galaxy
Georgia State’s CHARA Array Detects Elusive, Dusty Inner Region of Distant Galaxy
An international team of scientists has achieved the milestone of directly observing the long-sought, innermost dusty ring around a supermassive black hole, at a right angle to its emerging jet. Such a structure was thought to exist in the nucleus of galaxies but had been difficult to observe directly because intervening material obscured our line of sight.
Now the inner disk is detected using the highest spatial resolution in the infrared wavelengths ever done for an extragalactic object. The new discovery was just published in The Astrophysical Journal.