Supermassive black hole caught hiding in a ring of cosmic dust

An international team of scientists, among whom Carsten Dominik of the Anton Pannekoek Institute, used the the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI) to observe a cloud of cosmic dust at the centre of the galaxy Messier 77 that is hiding a supermassive black hole. The findings have confirmed predictions made around 30 years ago and are giving astronomers new insight into “active galactic nuclei”, some of the brightest and most enigmatic objects in the universe.