Last year, the astronomical community achieved an absolute wonder. For the very first time, the world collectively laid eyes on an
actual image of the shadow of a black hole. It was the culmination of years of work, a magnificent achievement in both human collaboration and technical ingenuity.
And, like the best scientific breakthroughs, it opened a whole new world of enquiry. For a team led by astrophysicist Hector Olivares from Radboud University in the Netherlands and Goethe University in Germany, that enquiry was: how do we
know M87* is a black hole?
"While the image is consistent with our expectations on what a black hole would look like, it is important to be sure that what we are seeing is really what we think," Olivares told ScienceAlert.
"Similarly to
black holes, boson stars are predicted by
general relativity and are able to grow to millions of solar masses and reach a very high compactness. The fact that they share these features with supermassive black holes led
some authors to
propose that some of the
supermassive compact objects located at the
center of galaxies could
actually be boson stars."
So, in a new paper, Olivares and his team have calculated what a boson star might look like to one of our telescopes, and how that would differ from a direct image of an accreting black hole.
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