REUTERS, Washington

After five decades of trying, astronomers have finally discovered the wind emanating from the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, though it turns out it is more of a gentle breeze than a hurricane.

Using data from the Chile-based ALMA telescope and NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, the researchers viewed the cosmic neighborhood around the black hole - called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short.

They spotted a vast conical cavity filled with hot, electrically charged gas adjacent to Sgr A* that they concluded was sculpted by wind blowing from the black hole that swept away or heated up the cold gas that had populated the region. They said the energy needed to create such a cavity could be generated only by a supermassive black hole.

Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. Galaxies typically have a supermassive black hole at their core that pulls in gas and other material in its surroundings.