Suddenly, the Milky Way's central black hole is starting to look a little less like a weirdo. Astronomers have discovered a large cone-shaped void in gas surrounding Sagittarius A*, the galaxy's supermassive black hole, that could solve a longstanding mystery. All active black holes should blow winds or jets of material back into space while they're feeding, according to theory. That process is how supermassive black holes shape the galaxies around them. But no matter how hard astronomers have looked, they haven't seen our black hole, dubbed Sgr A* for short, pushing anything back out.
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New images from a Northwestern University-led research team now suggest this cone tunneling through a fog of cold gas is evidence of that missing wind. It was almost literally an arrow pointing back at the black hole, said Mark Gorski, who co-led the study."This is the first time we've had a clean enough view to see the wind's imprint," Gorski said in a statement. "We looked at the data and said, 'There it is. There is the thing that everybody's been looking for for 50 years.'"
In reality, the discovery wasn't that straightforward of an a-ha moment. Only after the team had overlaid their picture with data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory did their observations begin to make sense. That gave them confidence the odd cone wasn't just an imaging artifact, they said. "When you find something that no one has seen before, the first thought that runs through your mind is not 'Oh my God, we made a discovery,'" said coauthor Elena Murchikova, in a statement. "It's 'Oh my God, what's wrong with my analysis?'"
