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Description
This is an artistic representation of the center of an active galaxy. A supermassive black hole is accreting material from a disk that's bigger than the entire Solar System and so hot that shines incredibly bright in the center, which is surrounded by a torus of dust several light years across. The inner edge of the torus is at the distance where dust grains cannot form closer to the center because they sublimate due to the high temperature, and this opening allows hot gas to be pushed away forming a biconical region that shines with the colours of the spectral lines of the elements forming it. Also, powerful jets of matter moving at relativistic speeds are emitted from the center of the system, and will shine in radio waves as the charged particles are accelerated in their magnetic fields.

I created this because I needed a representation of an AGN showing these regions for my thesis and a poster for a scientific conference next week, so why not do it myself. The radio jets are a bit too small when compared to the other elements, but they simply didn't fit had I made them bigger. However, they could have been born recently and not fully formed yet (they can become many thousands of light years long), and also a study in which I participated hints to the presence of small radio jets in active galaxies that don't have a lot of emission in radio, so perhaps this is not so inaccurate after all (arxiv.org/abs/1508.05842 ).

The picture was drawn in negative using a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil with a grade 2B lead, and then inverted in Photoshop. Regrettably, the photocopy machines in my department don't seem to scan greys well, so I had to take a picture with my phone to digitize it. I might replace the picture when I can access a proper scanner. EDIT: Done!

Description
This is an artistic representation of the center of an active galaxy. A supermassive black hole is accreting material from a disk that's bigger than the entire Solar System and so hot that shines incredibly bright in the center, which is surrounded by a torus of dust several light years across. The inner edge of the torus is at the distance where dust grains cannot form closer to the center because they sublimate due to the high temperature, and this opening allows hot gas to be pushed away forming a biconical region that shines with the colours of the spectral lines of the elements forming it. Also, powerful jets of matter moving at relativistic speeds are emitted from the center of the system, and will shine in radio waves as the charged particles are accelerated in their magnetic fields.

I created this because I needed a representation of an AGN showing these regions for my thesis and a poster for a scientific conference next week, so why not do it myself. The radio jets are a bit too small when compared to the other elements, but they simply didn't fit had I made them bigger. However, they could have been born recently and not fully formed yet (they can become many thousands of light years long), and also a study in which I participated hints to the presence of small radio jets in active galaxies that don't have a lot of emission in radio, so perhaps this is not so inaccurate after all (arxiv.org/abs/1508.05842 ).

The picture was drawn in negative using a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil with a grade 2B lead, and then inverted in Photoshop. Regrettably, the photocopy machines in my department don't seem to scan greys well, so I had to take a picture with my phone to digitize it. I might replace the picture when I can access a proper scanner. EDIT: Done!