studying active – Tonima Tasnim Ananna, an astrophysicist at Wayne State University, studies how supermassive black holes feed and shape their galaxies—using optical, infrared, and x-ray observations to see past the gas-and-dust rings called tori that can hide key details of ac
When Tonima Tasnim Ananna was growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, rolling blackouts turned ordinary nights into prime stargazing time. She remembers how you could look up and feel the sky open around you—“You’ll see your neighbors. and then you see the sky. ” she says. “And that’s how you become fascinated with the sky.”.
Now 35, Ananna is an astrophysicist at Wayne State University in Michigan, where she studies supermassive black holes. The work is about what these black holes do as they consume the matter around them—and how they influence the galaxies they inhabit. Even though black holes are dark by definition, the gas and dust falling toward them do not stay that way. As that material piles up. it forms a glowing. white-hot accretion disk. a power source for some of the brightest phenomena in the universe.
Among the most intensely active are supermassive black holes that are ferociously feeding. They can light up through phenomena called active galactic nuclei, or AGNs. Researchers have long been trying to understand how these engines—capable of shaping galaxies through creation and destruction—form and evolve.
Studying AGNs isn’t straightforward. They are often obscured by tori. orbiting rings of gas and dust that tend to sit farther out than the accretion disk and aren’t necessarily aligned in the same plane. In Ananna’s work, lifting those veils requires looking at AGNs across multiple wavelengths. By combining observations of AGNs in optical. infrared and x-ray wavelengths. her research helps separate what’s happening close to the black hole from what’s being hidden farther out.
One insight that comes out of this approach is that a torus obscuring an AGN can become a diagnostic tool—an avenue for determining otherwise hidden aspects of the black hole’s behavior. Ananna’s research also points to a relationship between what we see and the structure doing the blocking: the radiation emanating from an AGN’s accretion disk appears to dictate the size and orientation of its obscuring torus.
“Supermassive black holes are monstrous,” Ananna says. “They clearly have a huge impact on how the galaxies in which they reside grow; they seem to co-evolve. Some of these relations are pretty mysterious.”
Tonima Tasnim Ananna Wayne State University astrophysics supermassive black holes active galactic nuclei AGNs accretion disk torus multiwavelength observations optical infrared x-ray