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Tonima Tasmin Ananna says that when she was growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, rolling blackouts were the best time to look up at the stars. “You’ll see your neighbors, and then you see the sky,” she says. “And that’s how you become fascinated with the sky.”

Ananna is now an astrophysicist at Wayne State University in Michigan, where she studies supermassive black holes—how they consume the matter around them and how they influence the galaxies they inhabit. Although black holes are, by definition, dark, the gas and dust funneling toward a black hole’s maw pile up in a glowing, white-hot maelstrom called an accretion disk, the source of some of the brightest fireworks in the universe. The most ferociously feeding supermassive black holes power phenomena called active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Researchers have long sought to understand how these engines of galactic creation and destruction form and evolve.

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Studying AGNs isn’t always straightforward, though, in part because they are often obscured by tori, which are orbiting rings of gas and dust. (Tori tend to reside farther out than the accretion disk and aren’t necessarily oriented along the same plane.) Ananna’s research helps to lift these veils by combining observations of AGNs in optical, infrared and x-ray wavelengths. One insight arising from Ananna’s work is that a torus obscuring an AGN creates a useful opportunity—a diagnostic for determining otherwise hidden aspects of the black hole’s behavior. The radiation emanating from an AGN’s accretion disk also 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.”

This article is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.