Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2026

27 MARCH-APRIL 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING hole, is obscured from our point of view. For decades, astronomers con- tended with these difficulties, de- signing and improving models of Circinus with as much data as they could gather. “In order to study the supermassive black hole, despite being unable to resolve it, they had to obtain the total intensity of the inner region of the galaxy over a large wavelength range and then feed that data into models,” said lead author Enrique Lopez-Rodri- guez of the University of South Ca- rolina. Early models would fit the spectra from specific regions, such as the emissions from the torus, those of the accretion disk closest to the black hole, or those from the outflows, each detected at certain wavelengths of light. However, since the region could not be resolved in its entirety, these models left ques- tions at several wavelengths. For example, some telescopes could de- tect an excess of infrared light, but lacked the resolution to determine T his artist’s concept depicts the central engine of the Circinus galaxy. At the center is the supermassive black hole, shown as a bright, compact core. You don’t see the black hole itself, but the intense glow from material heating up as it spirals inward. Surrounding the center is a thick, donut-shaped disk of gas and dust (the torus). In Circinus, this torus, about 16 light-years across, is optically dense, mean- ing visible light can’t penetrate. The illustration empha- sizes that this dusty structure is brightest close to the black hole, matching the newest finding from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope that most of the light is coming from hot dust feeding the black hole rather than being blown away. The narrow, bright beams shooting outward represent jets, streams of ener- gized material launched per- pendicular to the disk. The soft, hazy glow around everything represents the surrounding galaxy and diffuse material. [NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)]