The Galactic Center as a laboratory for theories of gravity and dark matter

Abstract

The Galactic Center of the Milky Way, thanks to its proximity, allows to perform astronomical observations that investigate physical phenomena at the edge of astrophysics and fundamental physics. As such, it offers a unique laboratory to probe gravity, where one can not only test the basic predictions of General Relativity, but is also able to falsify theories that, over time, have been proposed to modify or extend General Relativity; to test different paradigms of dark matter; and to place constraints on putative models that have been formulated as alternatives to the standard black hole paradigm in General Relativity. In this review we provide a general overview of the history of observations of the Galactic Center, emphasizing the importance, in particular on the smallest-observable scales, that they had in opening a new avenue to improve our understanding of the underlying theory of gravity in the surrounding of a supermassive compact object.

Comments and suggestions are welcome. Revised version to appear in Reports on Progress in Physics

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Quasinormal modes-shadow correspondence for rotating regular black holes
• Exploring dark matter spike distribution around the Galactic centre with stellar orbits
• Using the motion of S2 to constrain scalar clouds around SgrA*
• Bounding the mass of ultralight bosonic Dark Matter particles with the motion of the S2 star around Sgr A*
• Constraints on metric-affine gravity black holes from the stellar motion at the Galactic Center
• Observational test of ${\mathcal{R}}^2$ spacetimes with the S2 star in the Milky Way galactic center
• Future prospects for measuring 1PPN parameters using observations of S2 and S62 at the Galactic Center
• Exploring the presence of a fifth force at the Galactic Center
• Effect of generic dark matter halo on transonic accretion onto galactic black holes
• PyGRO: a Python Integrator for General Relativistic Orbits
• Neural Network Analysis of S2-Star Dynamics: Extended mass
• Shedding Light on Gravity: Black Hole Shadows and Lensing Signatures in Lorentz Gauge Theory
• Constraining Gluonic Contact Interaction of a Neutrino-philic Dark Fermion at Hadron Colliders and Direct Detection Experiments
• Gravitational signatures beyond Newton: exploring hierarchical three-body dynamics
• Sagittarius A* near-infrared flares polarization as a probe of space-time I: Non-rotating exotic compact objects
• Timing Gravity with Pulsars in the Strong Field
• Detecting Lorentz-violation induced by a tensor field with S-star's motion around Sgr A*