A dusty supermassive black hole (artist's impression)

This animation shows the surroundings around a super-massive black hole. Supermassive black holes are found in the centres of active galaxies and have a dust torus around their waist. In some cases astronomers can look along the axis of the dust torus from above or from below and have a clear view of the black hole. For black holes that lie with the dust torus edge-on as viewed from Earth our view of the black hole is totally blocked by the dust over a range of wavelengths from the near-infrared to soft X-rays.

A European team led by Paolo Padovani from Space Telescope-European Coordinating Facility and the European Southern Observatory in Munich, Germany, recently discovered a whole population of these obscured, powerful supermassive black holes.