For 50 years, astronomers have been searching for evidence of winds emanating from the black hole Sagittarius A*. Now, they finally think they have an answer.
Every large galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole at its center, each one emitting powerful winds of hot gas from its event horizon. Our galaxy should be no exception. Yet for the last 50 or so years, astronomers have been searching for winds coming from the black hole at the Milky Way’s center, and in all that time, they found nothing. Not even a gentle breeze.
Until now. In a preliminary study, a team of scientists detail the strongest evidence found yet of winds flowing from the Milky Way’s black hole, Sagittarius A*. The breakthrough findings, posted to the preprint server arXiv in September, describe a large, cone-shaped region around the black hole where cold gas appears to have been blown away.
“If this is true, then it would be a very exciting discovery with some pretty broad implications for the center of our galaxy,” Lia Hankla, a postdoctoral astrophysicist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the study, told Science. While she notes that the missing gas is indirect evidence of the black hole’s wind, the findings are a major step forward in solving this case.
