Related papers: Hypercubes of AGN Tori (HYPERCAT) -- II. Resolving…
Near- and mid-infrared interferometers have resolved the dusty parsec-scale obscurer (torus) around nearby active galactic nuclei (AGNs). With the arrival of extremely large single-aperture telescopes, the emission morphology will soon be…
Recent observations of NGC 1068 and other AGN support the idea of a geometrically and optically thick dust torus surrounding the central supermassive black hole and accretion disk of AGN. In type 2 AGN, the torus is seen roughly edge-on,…
We describe improved modelling of the emission by dust in a toroidal--like structure heated by a central illuminating source within Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). We chose a simple but realistic torus geometry, a flared disc, and a dust…
Thanks to ground-based infrared and sub-mm observations the study of the dusty torus of nearby AGN has greatly advanced in the last years. With the aim of further investigating the nuclear mid-infrared emission of the archetypal Seyfert 2…
Advancements in infrared IR open up the possibility to spatially resolve AGN on the parsec-scale level and study the circumnuclear dust distribution, commonly referred to as the "dust torus", that is held responsible for the type 1/type 2…
We present arcsecond-scale observations of the active galactic nuclei (AGNs) of seven nearby Seyfert galaxies observed from the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) using the 31.5 and 37.1 um filters of the Faint Object…
Type 2 AGN are by definition nuclei in which the broad-line region and continuum light are hidden at optical/UV wavelengths by dust. Via accurate registration of infrared (IR) Very Large Telescope adaptive optics images with optical…
Dusty tori have been suggested to play a crucial role in determining the physical characteristics of active galactic nuclei (AGN), but investigation of their properties has stalled for lack of high resolution mid-IR imaging. Recently, a…
We explore physically self-consistent models of dusty molecular tori in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) with the goal of interpreting VLTI observations and fitting high resolution mid-IR spectral energy distributions (SEDs). The input dust…
Warm gas and dust surround the innermost regions of active galactic nuclei (AGN). They provide the material for accretion onto the super-massive black hole and they are held responsible for the orientation-dependent obscuration of the…
The accretion rates needed to fuel the central black hole in a galaxy can be achieved via viscous torques in thick disks and rings, which can be resolved by millimetre interferometry within the inner ~20pc of the active galaxy NGC1068 at…
We present 12.8 microns images of the core of NGC 1068 obtained with the BURST mode of the VLT/VISIR. We trace structures under the diffraction limit of one UT and we investigate the link between dust in the vicinity of the central engine…
Aims: In this paper, we aim to constrain the properties of dust structures in the central first parsecs of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Our goal is to study the required optical depth and composition of different dusty and ionised…
We present results from a survey of nearby AGN using the near infrared adaptive optics integral field spectrograph SINFONI. These data enable us to probe the distribution and kinematics of the gas and stars at spatial resolutions as small…
From extensive radiative transfer calculations we find that clumpy torus models with \No \about 5--15 dusty clouds along radial equatorial rays successfully explain AGN infrared observations. The dust has standard Galactic composition, with…
We assume that dust near active galactic nuclei (AGN) is distributed in a torus-like geometry, which may be described by a clumpy medium or a homogeneous disk or as a combination of the two (i.e. a 2-phase medium). The dust particles…
This paper presents unique adaptive optics images at 3.5 and 4.8 microns of the central arcsec in the AGN of NGC1068. They enlight the presence of hot to warm dust close to the central engine of the AGN. At a radius around 40 pc, the dust…
The unified model of active galactic nuclei (AGN) claims that the properties of AGN depend on the viewing angle of the observer with respect to a toroidal distribution of dust surrounding the nucleus. Both the mid-infrared (MIR) attenuation…
We present new interferometric data obtained with MIDI (MID infrared Interferometric instrument) for the Seyfert II galaxy NGC 1068, with an extensive coverage of sixteen uv points. These observations resolve the nuclear mid-infrared…
The "torus" is the central element of the most popular theory unifying various classes of AGNs, but it is usually described as "putative" because it has not been imaged yet. Since it is too small to be resolved with single-dish telescopes,…