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.

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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.

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“We know it has to be at the outskirts of galaxies, but we don’t know what happens at the very centre,” says Valentina Crespi at the National University of La Plata (UNLP) in Argentina.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516077-is-our-galaxys-black-hole-actually-made-of-dark-matter/

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Is our galaxy’s black hole actually made of dark matter?

An exotic type of dark matter could explain some of the characteristics of our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, but many cosmologists are leery of the idea

New Scientist