Theoretically speaking, black holes should breathe stuff out as they suck stuff in. But for 50 years, astronomers weren’t able to confirm this was true for the supermassive black hole in our own galaxy—until now. In a study published yesterday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astrophysicists at Northwestern University presented potential evidence of a giant, cone-shaped hole in the cold gas surrounding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. When the team calculated how much energy was required to create this cavity, they found there had to be some input from the black hole—something like a powerful wind or jet. To arrive at these conclusions, the team compiled five years’ worth of observations by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. “Unless a black hole exists in a perfect vacuum, it must blow a wind somehow,” study co-lead author Mark Gorski said in a statement. “With new observations, this is the first time we’ve had a clean enough view to see the wind’s imprint. We looked at the data and said, ‘There it is. There is the thing that everybody’s been looking for for 50 years.’” The edge of chaos All sizeable galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center. According to the study, these black holes are crucial to galaxy evolution. As black holes are “fed” materials, the stuff getting sucked in spirals inward and eventually approaches the speed of light. The energy and pressure generated in this process produce hot, powerful winds that fly outward from the black hole, the paper explained.