Imaging the Dusty Torus Around Supermassive Black Holes

Black hole growth is connected to the growth of galaxies and galaxies are the building blocks of the Universe. Black holes at the centers of galaxies grow through mergers and accretion of gas onto the supermassive black hole. As gas falls onto the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, it forms a hot disk, called an accretion disk, that emits enormous amounts of energy from the x-rays to the radio. But this disk is often hidden and there is a lot of evidence that the obscuration is because of a thick dust and gas region around the disk, dubbed the dusty torus. This dusty torus therefore has significant consequences on how this active galactic nucleus (AGN) can affect the evolution of its host galaxy as well as how much energy escapes the galaxy to affect the rest of the Universe. This leads to critical questions like how does the structure of the dust around the accretion disk affect the co-evolution of black holes and their host galaxies? Also, is the dust structure sufficiently thick (The outer edge potentially being as thick as ~120 degrees) to reproduce the observed populations of AGNs? There is great potential for the Habitable Worlds Observatory to image AGNs that have their dust disk oriented edge-on to our vantage point, and so, with the right resolution, can give a direct absorption image of the size and shape of the dusty torus.