Hot winds detected blowing from Milky Way's black hole
For the first time ever, scientists have detected hot winds blowing out from Sagittarius A*, the giant black hole at our galaxy's center.
After years of searching through thick clouds of gas and dust, this long-predicted phenomenon has finally been reported in a preprint posted to arXiv in September 2025.
How researchers spotted the hot winds
Researchers, including Lena Murchikova and Mark Gorski, spent about 100 hours using Chile's ALMA radio telescope to map cold gas near Sagittarius A*.
They found a cone-shaped gap in the gas—just what models predicted if hot winds were pushing it outward.
Importance of spotting these hot winds
By matching these maps with X-ray data from NASA's Chandra Observatory, scientists showed that this gap lines up perfectly with hot gas emissions.
Spotting these winds is a big deal: they help explain how supermassive black holes shape their galaxies by heating up gas and slowing down star formation.
It's a major clue to how our own Milky Way evolves.