Document Type
Article
Abstract
The dusty and molecular torus is an elusive structure surrounding supermassive black holes, yet its importance is unequivocal for understanding feedback and accretion mechanisms. The torus and accretion disk feed the inspiraling gas onto the active nucleus, launching outflows that fundamentally connect the active nucleus’s activity to the host galaxy. In this work, we utilize the aperture-masking interferometric mode onboard the JWST to achieve a resolution of 0.08" at 4.3 μm and bring out the fainter features in the central 10 pc of the Circinus galaxy. We show that most of the dust mass is located along the equatorial axis in the form of a 5 × 3 pc disk feeding the active nucleus. Only < 1% of the dust emission arises from an arc structure composed of hot dust entrained in a molecular and ionized outflow, while the extended emission is associated with dust heated by the active galaxy at large scales.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Nature Communications, Volume 17, 2026.
© The Author(s) 2025 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
APA Citation
Lopez-Rodriguez, E., Sanchez-Bermudez, J., González-Martín, O., Nikutta, R., Lau, R. M., Thatte, D., García-Bernete, I., Girard, J. H., & Hankins, M. J. (2026). JWST interferometric imaging reveals the dusty torus obscuring the supermassive black hole of Circinus galaxy. Nature Communications, 17.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66010-5