14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers from the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics have just put forth the most compelling evidence to date that a supermassive black hole is located at the core of the Milky Way. They argue that the large amounts of matter, energy and light that are vanishing in the middle of the galaxy can only go to one place, and that's beyond the event horizon of a black hole. In the Universe, there are numerous dark formations that absorb light, but, in order for one of the them to be called a black hole, it absolutely needs to have an event horizon, a threshold that, once passed, renders matter and light unable to return. So, from an outside perspective, it appears like the things that go into it simply vanish from existence.
When discovering such an object in the sky, astronomers know that it can either be a black hole, which it most often turns out to be, or a lump of exotic matter known as a boson star. The latter class of celestial objects also absorbs light and matter, but does not have event horizons, and does not make entire galaxies spin around them. It is also rarely surrounded by massive clusters and stellar nurseries.
Using readings captured by a large number of infrared and X-ray telescopes, the Canadian researchers set out to prove that the formation at the core of the Milky Way was a black hole. They took the long road to showing this, and hypothesized that, if the object was not a black hole, then it should be visible in the infrared spectrum. All objects in space, except black holes, of course, have a unique infrared signature, generated by matter and gas falling towards them. The kinetic energy that incoming matter has is easily converted into heat, which emanates in the infrared wavelength spectrum.
If the formation at the core of the Milky Way were not a black hole, then emissions coming from it would be about 250 times brighter than they are now, the researcher explain. “Too much energy is falling into the object for us to not see the emission from the surface,” Avery Broderick, the leader of the CITA research team, argues, as quoted by NewScientist. He says that matter and energy must, indeed, fall behind an event horizon, if readings taken with the most powerful telescopes in the world are so low. However, the expert admits, another possibility exists that would explain the strange behavior of matter at the core of our galaxy.
The team explains that a wormhole could be responsible for the vacuum effect we see. Wormholes are hypothetical and yet-unconfirmed structures in space that connect one area of the Universe to another, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of light-years away. So, matter going inside the wormhole at the core of the Milky Way could actually be coming out in a totally obscured region of space that we cannot see on account of its distance.