Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2022

25 MAY-JUNE 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING Team member Bruno Lopez, the MATISSE Principal Investigator at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, says: “Messier 77 is an important prototype AGN and a wonderful motivation to expand our observing programme and to optimise MATISSE to tackle a wider sample of AGNs.” ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), set to begin observing later this decade, will also aid the search, providing re- sults that will complement the team’s findings and allow them to explore the interaction between AGNs and galaxies. ! T his composite image shows the central region of the barred spiral galaxy Messier 77. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope imaged the distribution of stars. ALMA revealed the distribution of gas in the very center of the galaxy. ALMA imaged a horseshoe-like structure with a radius of 700 light-years and a central compact component with a radius of 20 light-years. The latter is the gaseous torus around the AGN. Red color indicates emission from formyl ions and green indicates hydrogen cyanide emission. [ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO/Iman- ishi et al./NASA/ESA/Hubble/A. van der Hoeven]