• An image of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in polarised light, captured by the Event Horizon TelescopeEHT Collaboration An image of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in polarised light, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope EHT Collaboration At the centre of our galaxy lies a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* - but one group of researchers is suggesting it may not be a black hole at all. • The team says that it, and other black holes around its size, may actually be clumps of dark matter. • Dark matter, so named because it doesn’t seem to interact with light or regular matter in any way except gravitationally, makes up about 85 per cent of the total matter in the universe, but we know very little about it. • What we do know, because of the way galaxies rotate, is that most galaxies are embedded in a halo of the stuff. • “We know it has to be at the outskirts of galaxies, but we don’t know what happens at the very centre,” saysValentina Crespiat the National University of La Plata (UNLP) in Argentina. • Read moreDo black holes exist and, if not, what have we really been looking at?
Article Summaries:
- A team from the National University of La Plata has proposed that the Milky Way’s central supermassive “black hole,” Sagittarius A*, could instead be a dense clump of fermionic dark matter. Their model reproduces the orbits of nearby stars, the galaxy’s rotation curve, and the 2022 Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) image of a glowing ring, suggesting a dark‑matter core could mimic a black hole from Earth. However, other experts point out that the EHT’s magnetic‑field pattern near the event horizon and the mass limit of fermionic clumps (≈10 million M☉) challenge the hypothesis. While intriguing, the idea remains unconfirmed and is still debated.
Sources: