Stefan Gillessen and Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and their colleagues used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe the Milky Way's
center at infrared wavelengths, which penetrate the thick dust between it and us.
Previously, astronomers have used x-ray telescopes to observe strong winds very near the massive black holes
at galactic
centers (artist's concept, inset) and
infrared wavelengths to detect the vast outflows of cool gas (bluish haze in artist's concept, main image) from such galaxies as a whole, but they've never done so in the same galaxy.