What if it's not a black hole at all? What if it's a core of dark matter? According to a new and fascinating study, those observed orbits of the galactic center, as well as the orbital velocities in the outer regions of the galaxy, might actually be easier to explain if it was a core of dark matter at the heart of the galaxy, rather than a black hole.
Why ..
Then along came an object called G2. Also on a long, elliptical orbit, G2 did something strange when it came around its periapsis in 2014, the point in its orbit closest to the putative black hole. It went from a normal, compact object to something long and stretched out, before shrinking back down to a compact object again.
This was really weird, and G2's nature is still unknown. But whatever it is, the object's motion following periapsis seems to exhibit drag - which, according to a team of astrophysicists led by Eduar Antonio Becerra-Vergara of the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, headquartered in Italy, is not entirely consistent with the black hole model.
Because ...
The researchers showed last year that S2 and G2 were consistent with a different model, even with that strange post-periapsis motion: dark matter fermions, which they dub 'darkninos', with a light-enough mass that wouldn't see them collapse into a black hole until there was at least 100 times as much of the stuff.
Read the rest of Science Alert's piece to learn why this wild theory may ring true.
No comments:
Post a Comment