The Supermassive Black Hole at the Heart of Our Galaxy Seems to Be Blowing Wind—Just as Scientists Long Theorized

Scientists have been searching for evidence of this breeze since the 1970s. They’ve seen intense wind from other black holes, but they’ve struggled to observe the one at the Milky Way’s center

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

June 5, 2026 3:34 p.m.

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Every large galaxy, including our own Milky Way, is thought to have a supermassive black hole at its center. These behemoths are known to consume anything that gets too close.

Before falling into a black hole, its feast of gas and dust spirals inward toward the object. The material travels faster as it nears the black pit, generating enough energy to fling away some would-be food and creating wind. While scientists have observed strong winds from other black holes, the Milky Way’s supermassive resident, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, appeared to be an outlier.

Now, after more than 50 years of searching, scientists say they’ve finally found evidence of a mild breeze billowing from our galaxy’s heart. The findings, published on June 4 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest that the Milky Way isn’t a weirdo and that even quiet black holes blow wind, albeit relatively gently.

“We have never seen a breeze from a black hole,” says Lena Murchikova, a study co-author and astrophysicist at Northwestern University, to Jeanna Bryner at Scientific American. “We usually see the consequences of outbursts or other violent activities. Seeing the black hole sitting there, being quiet but still dumping energy all over the region without doing anything violent, is terribly cute.”

Scientists have struggled to find Sgr A*’s wind largely because it’s hard to see through all the gas, stars and debris blocking our view of the black hole. But Murchikova and Northwestern astrophysicist Mark Gorski thought they could catch a better glimpse using new data processing techniques.

So, they collected about 100 hours of observations of the black hole gathered between 2017 and 2021 using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array radio telescope in Chile. They removed the radio wavelengths of light and constructed the sharpest image yet of cold molecular gas surrounding Sgr A*.

The image revealed a cone-shaped gap in the gas around three light-years long and with an opening angle of about 45 degrees. A hole of this size could have been formed only by hot wind blowing from the black hole, the researchers say.

“If you blow hot material from the black hole, it’s not going to want to exist with the cold material,” Gorski says in a statement. “It’s either going to push the cold material out or heat it up. And, if it’s too hot, you will no longer see the cold gas.”

The researchers strengthened their discovery with data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which showed bright X-rays—emitted by extremely hot gas—coming from the same conical region. The space telescope’s image “just slotted in perfectly. The molecular features lined up,” Gorski notes in the statement.

The team estimates that the wind has been blowing for at least 20,000 years and is gentle compared to that of other supermassive black holes. The work also provides affirmation that  Sgr A* is currently in a quiet state, which is how supermassive black holes spend most of their lives.

“The potential discovery of a wind coming from Sagittarius A* is indeed a big deal,” says Rebecca Diesing, an astrophysicist at Columbia University who was not involved in the research, to Mara Johnson-Groh at Science News. “It would demonstrate that our supermassive black hole is not unique, that it produces a wind just like those in other galaxies.”

Still, Diesing would like to see more evidence than the gas-free region. Future work could confirm the wind by investigating the speed of the gas leaving the cavity, for instance.

The findings can help deepen our understanding of how black holes shape galaxies. Their winds can slow star formation by preventing gas clumps from collapsing and seeding stars, or they can do the opposite by compressing gases and creating conditions favorable for star formation.

Last year, after the study was posted to the preprint server arXiv, astrophysicist Shobita Satyapal told Science’s Hannah Richter that she hopes the findings will inspire more researchers to look into black holes’ effects on the birth of stars.

“I think that’s where you’re going to see a lot of revolution in the field,” said Satyapal, of George Mason University, who wasn’t involved in the work.

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.