Colloquium talk given at the Observatory of Belgrade in 2017 as an overview of high angular resolution imaging of AGN
The nuclei of many galaxies shine bright throughout all the electromagnetic spectrum. This powerful emission if often brighter than all the star light of the galaxy combined. Its source is an accreting supermassive black hole in the galaxy center. However, around half of the accretion disk emission does not escape the nuclear region but is instead absorbed by an unknown dust structure and reemitted in the infrared. I will present an overview of our attempts to detect and resolve this dust structure in nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN) and review the surprising results emerging from recent highest angular resolution observations.
