  The study of the physics of accretion discs developed around the supermassive
black hole (BH) candidates are essential theoretical tools to test their
nature. Here, we study the accretion flow and associated emission using
generalised $\alpha$-discs on to horizonless dark compact objects, in order to
compare with the traditional BH scenario. The BH alternative here proposed
consists in a dense and highly degenerate core made of fermionic dark matter
(DM) which is surrounded by a more diluted DM halo. Such a dense core --
diluted halo DM configuration is a solution of the Einstein equations of
General Relativity (GR) in spherical symmetry, which naturally arises once the
quantum nature of the DM fermions is dully accounted for. The methodology
followed in this work consist in first generalising the theory of
$\alpha$-discs to work in the presence of regular and horizonless compact
objects, and second, to apply it to the case of core-halo DM profiles typical
of active-like galaxies. The fact that the compactness of the dense and
transparent DM core scales with the particle mass, allows for the following key
findings of this work: (i) it always exist a given core compacity -- i.e.,
corresponding particle mass -- which produces a luminosity spectrum which is
basically indistinguishable from that of a Schwarzschild BH of the same mass as
the DM core; (ii) the disc can enter deep inside the non-rotating DM core,
allowing for accretion powered efficiencies as high as $28\%$, thus comparable
to that of a highly rotating Kerr BH. These results, together with the
existence of a critical DM core mass of collapse into a supermassive BH, open
new avenues of research for two seemingly unrelated topics such as AGN
phenomenology and dark matter physics.
