The Milky Way's supermassive black hole: how good a case is it? A challenge for astrophysics \& philosophy of science (Q2014301): Difference between revisions

This review paper carefully describes and analyzes the arguments that can lead to the notion of a black hole and its possible observation. It has 330 references from mathematical, astronomical, physical, historical and philosophical sources. After a nice introduction, Section 2 deals with the concept of black holes, both in general relativity and in quantum theory. It presents several variants of the black hole uniqueness theorem. Section 3 covers philosophical issues like underdetermination and the Eleatic principle. Section 4 is on observations, and Section 5 discusses alternatives to the black hole scenario. From the authors's summary: ``The compact and \dots very massive object located at the center of the Milky Way is currently the very best candidate for a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in our immediate vicinity. The strongest evidence for this is provided by measurements of stellar orbits, variable X-ray emission, and strongly variable polarized near-infrared emission from the location of the radio source Sagittarius A* (SgrA*) in the middle of the central stellar cluster. Simultaneous near-infrared and X-ray observations of SgrA* have revealed insights into the emission mechanisms responsible for the powerful near-infrared and X-ray flares from within a few tens to one hundred Schwarzschild radii of such a putative SMBH. If SgrA* is indeed a SMBH it will, in projection onto the sky, have the largest event horizon and will certainly be the first and most important target for very long baseline interferometry observations currently being prepared by the event horizon telescope (EHT). These observations in combination with the infrared interferometry experiment GRAVITY at the very large telescope interferometer and other experiments across the electromagnetic spectrum might yield proof for the presence of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The large body of evidence continues to discriminate the identification of SgrA* as a SMBH from alternative possibilities. It is, however, unclear when the ever mounting evidence for SgrA* being associated with a SMBH will suffice as a convincing proof \dots. This manuscript reviews the observational facts, theoretical grounds and conceptual aspects for the case of SgrA* being a black hole. We treat theory and observations in the framework of the philosophical discussions about (anti)realism and underdetermination.''