Overview
- Published on February 5 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the paper by Valentina Crespi and colleagues models a self-gravitating fermionic dark-matter core at the Galactic Center.
- The simulations reproduce the rapid orbits of S-stars and the nearby G-sources with differences of less than 1% compared with a supermassive black hole model.
- The model accounts for Gaia DR3’s reported Keplerian slowdown in the Milky Way’s outer rotation curve through a compact core coupled to a more diffuse halo acting as a unified structure.
- Prior work cited by the authors shows an illuminated dense dark-matter core could cast a shadow resembling the Event Horizon Telescope image attributed to Sagittarius A*.
- The authors report current observations cannot distinguish the two scenarios and highlight GRAVITY interferometry and searches for photon-ring signatures as critical upcoming tests.