Not so long ago, black holes were like unicorns: fantastical creatures that flourished on paper, not in life. Today, there is wide scientific consensus that black holes are real. Even though they can’t be observed directly—by definition, they give off no light—astronomers can infer their hidden presence by watching how stars, gas, and dust swirl and glow around them. But what if they’re wrong? Could something else—massive, dense, all-but-invisible—be concealed in the darkness?

A telescope as big as the Earth could tell a black hole from an exotic imposter.

While black holes have gone mainstream, a handful of researchers are investigating exotic ultra-compact stars that, they argue, would look exactly like black holes from afar. Well, almost exactly. Though their ideas have been around for many years, researchers are now putting them to the most stringent tests ever, looking to show once and for all that what looks and quacks like a black hole really is a black hole. And if not? Well, it could just spark the next revolution in physics. The game-changer is a new experiment called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The EHT is a network of telescopes that are sensitive to radio waves about a millimeter long and linked together using a technique called very long baseline interferometry. Baseline refers to the distance between the networked telescopes: the longer the distance, the finer the details the telescope can pick out. It’s impossible—or at least impractical—to build a single telescope as big as planet Earth, but astronomers can achieve the same “zoom” factor by linking telescopes on opposite continents. Just like that, the universe goes from standard-definition to HD: a switch powerful enough to tell a black hole from an exotic imposter. Meanwhile, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves for the first time using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, also known as LIGO. Gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted should radiate out from the site of any gravitational disturbance—represent an entirely new way to see the cosmos , and with enough data, they could finally confirm—or contradict—the existence of black holes.

Black Hole Anatomy On its own, a black hole looks like nothing: black-on-black, indistinguishable from the empty space that surrounds it. But supermassive black holes, which are believed to sit at the core of almost every galaxy in the universe, surrounded by stars and other galactic detritus that accumulates around the edge like soap suds circling the bathtub drain. By studying those “suds,” astronomers can answer questions about the central black hole. The best-studied black hole candidate in the universe is the one called Sagittarius A*, which lives at the center of our very own Milky Way galaxy. By tracking the orbits of stars circling around Sagittarius A*, they have deduced that Sagittarius A* packs some 4 million times the mass of the Sun into a region of space much smaller than the solar system. Their conclusion: it could only be a supermassive black hole. Supermassive black holes are thought to sit at the center of every galaxy, including this one, Messier 106. But what if something else lurked in the starry froth? To confirm that suspicion, they would like to see up to the edge of the black hole—the event horizon, a sort of line in the sand that separates the “inside” of the black hole from the “outside” and beyond which nothing can escape. From the perspective of a telescope on Earth, the event horizon should look like a dark shadow surrounded by a bright ring of light. The exact shape of this ring and shadow are predicted by the equations of general relativity, plus the properties of the black hole and its surroundings.

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An Earth-Sized Telescope That’s where the EHT comes in. Since the EHT first started taking data, it has been building its telescope roster, and with each new member, it gets closer to making the first true image of a black hole shadow. The EHT is like an all-star team of telescopes: Most days, its millimeter-wave dishes run their own experiments independently, but for one or two weeks a year, they team up to become the EHT, taking new data and running tests during the brief window when astronomers can expect clear weather at sites from Hawaii to Europe to the South Pole. “It sounds too good to be true that you just drop telescopes around the world and ‘poof!’ you have an Earth-sized telescope,” says Avery Broderick, a theoretical astrophysicist at University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute. And in a way, it is. The EHT doesn’t make pictures. Instead, it turns out a kind of mathematical cipher called a Fourier transform, which is like the graphic equalizer on your stereo: it divvies up the incoming signal, whether its an image of space or a piece of music, into the different frequencies that make it up and tells you how much power is stored in each frequency. So far, the EHT has only given astronomers a look at a few scattered pixels of the Fourier transform. When they compare those pixels to what they expect to see in the case of a true black hole, they find a good match. But the job is like trying to figure out whether you’re listening to Beethoven or the Beastie Boys based only on a few slivers of the graphic equalizer curve.

Black holes are mothers of cosmic paradox.

Now, the EHT is about to add a superstar player: the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a telescope made up of 66 high-precision dishes sited 16,000 feet above sea level in Chile’s clear, dry Atacama desert. With ALMA on board, the EHT will finally be able to make the leap from fitting models to seeing a complete picture of the black hole’s shadow. EHT astronomers are now rounding up time at all of the telescopes so that they can take new data and assemble that first coveted image in 2017. And if they don’t see what they expect? It could mean that the black hole isn’t really a black hole at all. That would come as a relief to many theorists. Black holes are mothers of cosmic paradox, keeping physicists up at night with the puzzles they present: Do black holes really destroy information ? Do they really contain infinitely dense points called singularities? Black holes are also the battlefield on which general relativity and quantum mechanics clash most dramatically. If it turns out that they don’t actually exist, some physicists might sleep a little better. But if they’re not black holes, then what could they be? One possibility is that they are dark stars made up of bosons, subatomic particles that, unlike more familiar electrons and protons, obey strange rules that allow more than one of them to be in the same place at the same time. Boson stars are highly speculative—astronomers have never seen one, as far as they know—but theorists like Vitor Cardoso, a professor of physics at Técnico in Lisbon and a distinguished visiting researcher at Sapienza University of Rome, hypothesize that some or all of the objects we think are supermassive black holes could actually be boson stars in disguise. Physicists classify particles into two different categories: fermions, which include protons, electrons, neutrons, and their components; and bosons, like photons (light particles), gluons, and Higgs particles. Every star that we’ve ever seen shining is dominated by fermions. But, Cardoso says, given a starting environment rich in bosons, bosons could “clump” together gravitationally to form stars, just as fermions do. The early universe might have had a high enough density of bosons for boson stars to form. But not every boson is a suitable building block for a boson star. Gravity won’t hold together a clump of massless photons, for instance. Higgs particles are massive enough to be bound together by gravity, but they aren’t stable—they only exist for tiny fraction of a second before decaying away. Theorists have speculated about ways to stabilize Higgs particles, but Cardoso is more intrigued by the prospect that other, yet-undiscovered heavy bosons, like axions , could make up boson stars. In fact, some physicists hypothesize that massive bosons like these could be responsible for dark matter—meaning that boson stars wouldn’t just be a solution to the riddle of black holes, they could also tell us what, exactly, dark matter is. Gravastars Boson stars aren’t the only black hole doppelgänger that theorists have dreamed up. In 2001, researchers proposed an even more speculative oddity called a gravastar . In the gravastar model, as a would-be black hole collapses under its own weight, extreme gravity combines with quantum fluctuations that are constantly jiggling through space to create a bubble of exotic spacetime that halts the cave-in. Theorists don’t really know what’s inside that bubble, which is both good and bad news for gravastars: Good news because it gives theorists the flexibility to revise the model as new observations come in, bad news because scientists are rightly skeptical of any model that can be patched up to match the data. When the data does come in, physicists have a checklist of sorts that should help them know which of the three—black hole, boson star, or gravastar—they’re looking at. A gravastar should have a bright surface that’s distinguishable from the glowing ring predicted to loop around a black hole. Meanwhile, if the object at the center of the Milky Way is actually a boson star, Cardoso predicts, it will look more like a “normal” star. “Black holes are black all the way through,” Cardoso says. “If really the object is a boson star, then the luminous material can in principle pile up at its center. A bright spot should be detected right at the center of the object.” A New View Most physicists have placed their bets on Saggitarius A* and other candidates being black holes, though. Boson stars and gravastars already have a few strikes against them. First, when it comes to scientific credibility, black holes have a major head start. Astronomers have a solid understanding of the process by which black holes form and have direct evidence that other ultra-dense objects, like white dwarfs and neutron stars, which could merge to form black holes, really do exist. The alternatives are more speculative on every count.

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Furthermore, Broderick says, astronomers have looked for the telltale signature of boson stars and gravastars at the center of the Milky Way—and haven’t found it. “The stuff raining down on the object will give up all its kinetic energy—all the gravitational binding energy tied up in the kinetic energy of its fall—resulting in a thermal bump in the spectrum,” Broderick says —that is, a signature spike in infrared emission. In 2009, astrophysicists reported that they had found no such bump coming from Sagittarius A*, and in 2015, they announced that it was missing from the nearby massive galaxy M87, too.

“To confirm or rule out boson stars entirely, we need ‘louder’ observations.”

Cardoso doesn’t see this as a death-knell for the boson star model, though. “The field that makes up the boson star hardly interacts with matter,” he says. To ordinary matter, the surface of a boson star would feel like frothed milk. “We do not yet have a complete model of how these objects accrete luminous matter,” Cardoso says, “so I think that it’s fair to say that this is still an open question.” He is less optimistic about gravastars, which he describes as “artificial constructs” that are likely ruled out by the latest observations. As the LIGO experiment gathers more data, theorists will get more opportunities to test their exotic hypotheses with gravitational waves. As two massive objects—say, a supermassive black hole and a star—spiral toward each other on the way toward a collision, gravitational waves carry away the energy of their motion. If one member of the spiraling pair is a black hole, the gravitational wave signal will cut off abruptly as the star passes through the black hole’s event horizon. “It gives rise to a very characteristic ringdown in the final stages of the inspiral,” Cardoso says. Because the alternative models have no such horizon, the gravitational wave signal would keep on reverberating. Most astronomers believe that the waves LIGO detected were given off by the collision of two black holes, but Cardoso thinks that boson stars shouldn’t be ruled out just yet. “The data is, in principle, compatible with the two colliding objects being each a boson star,” he says. The end result, though, is probably a black hole “because it rings down very fast.” LIGO is not designed to pick up signals at the frequency at which supermassive objects like Sagittarius A* are expected to “ring.” (LIGO is tuned to recognize gravitational waves from smaller black holes and dense stars like neutron stars.) But supermassive black holes and boson stars are in the sweet spot for the planned space-based gravitational wave telescope eLISA (the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), slated for launch in 2034. “To confirm or rule out boson stars entirely, we need ‘louder’ observations,” Cardoso says. “EHT or eLISA are probably our best bet.” Taking the Pulse In the meantime, astronomers could measure waves from these extremely massive objects by precisely clocking the arrival times of radio pulses from a special class of dead stars called pulsars. If astronomers spot pulses arriving systematically off-beat, that could be a sign that the space they’ve been traveling across is being stretched and squeezed by gravitational waves. Three collaborations—NANOGrav in North America, the European Pulsar Timing Array, and the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array in Australia—are already scanning for these signals using radio telescopes scattered around the globe. To Broderick, though, the big question isn’t which model will win out, it’s whether these new experiments can find a flaw in general relativity. “For 100 years, general relativity has been enormously successful, and there’s no hint of where it breaks,” he says. Yet general relativity and quantum mechanics, which appears equally shatterproof, are fundamentally incompatible. Somewhere, one or both must break down. But where? Boson stars and gravastars might not be the answer. Still, exploring these exotic possibilities forces physicists to ask the questions that might lead them to something even more profound. “We expect that general relativity will pass the EHT’s tests with flying colors,” Broderick says. “But the great hope is that it won’t, that we’ll finally find the loose thread to pull on that will unravel the next great revolution in physics.”

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Caltech/P.Ogle et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA