Black Hole Wind Clears the Galactic Center ✛
Original: "The Discovery of an Active Wind from the Milky Way's Black Hole"
For the first time, scientists have seen the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s heart unleashing a hot wind.
In the center of our Galaxy lurks a black hole named Sagittarius A*. For decades, astronomers searched for its 'breath' — ejections of matter — but to no avail. Then the ALMA telescope spotted, in cold hydrogen, a giant cone-shaped cavity blown by the wind from the black hole. The scale is staggering: the cavity is over three light-years long, and the angle is almost 45 degrees.
The speed of this wind reaches tens of thousands of kilometers per second.
For comparison: the fastest hurricane on Earth is a thousand times slower. Such a gale-force wind can 'snuff out' newborn stars — literally scatter the gas from which they form.
Now it’s clear how black holes run the show in galaxies: they don’t just devour matter, they also dictate where new worlds can emerge.
Although black holes are famous for sucking everything in, they can also 'exhale' — flinging matter out as hot wind.
Scientists
Stephen HawkingJacob BekensteinFritz ZwickyBernhard RiemannJoseph WeberKarl Schwarzschildmilky way central black hole
galactic center
black hole wind
active galaxy
accretion disk wind
galactic winds
milky way
m87
host galaxy
blazar
obscured quasar
obscured agn
quasar feedback
hills mechanism
changing agn activity
torus
gw190814
ultra fast outflow
gaia
parker solar probe