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Scientists have found evidence of a weak cosmic wind flowing from Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Using nearly five years of ALMA observations and data from NASA’s Chandra Observatory, researchers identified a cavity in surrounding gas that suggests the black hole is producing a faint outflow, potentially resolving a mystery that has puzzled astronomers for decades.

A Decades-Old Mystery May Finally Be Resolved

Scientists have found evidence of a vast wind flowing from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, potentially solving a mystery that has puzzled astronomers for more than 50 years.

Sgr A*, which has a mass roughly four million times that of the Sun, was expected to behave like other black holes by not only consuming matter but also expelling some of it through winds or jets. Yet despite extensive observations, researchers had only found signs of eruptions that occurred more than 20,000 years ago, with no indication of recent activity.

“This is our closest and best-studied black hole,” said Mark Gorski, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “It’s the one we can resolve and see all of the physics around it, and yet it didn’t seem to have a wind. Every black hole in the universe behaves in this one way, but the one that’s closest to us is different. That was a huge problem.”