The Center of the Milky Way Might Not Be a Black Hole After All
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What if the center of our galaxy isn’t a supermassive black hole after all, but instead, a massive amount of dark matter? That would flip our long-held understanding of the Milky Way, but in a new study, scientists from Italy, Argentina, and Colombia say the evidence stacks up.
The idea of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is well-established, based partly on the orbit of specific stars like S0-2. Scientists study these objects in orbit as a way to extrapolate what they’re actually orbiting around—in this case, “a supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun,” ScienceAlert explains.
That supermassive black hole is called Sagittarius A*. S0-2 and other established stars are pulled every which way in their orbits around Sagittarius A*, into extreme orbits that scientists measure in order to get some idea of what the supermassive black hole is all about. Think about how soap suds behave as water swirls down your drain and what that tells you about what the drain is doing. Even if you couldn’t see the drain directly, the behaviors around it would give you clues.
