Gravitational collapse of Hagedorn fluids

TL;DR

This paper models the gravitational collapse of high-density Hagedorn fluids, showing that collapse can halt and bounce, potentially preventing black hole formation and suggesting alternative compact objects.

Contribution

It introduces a relativistic collapse model with Hagedorn phase matter and semiclassical corrections, highlighting a bounce instead of black hole formation.

Findings

Collapse reaches a minimum size and bounces.

Conditions for collapse to halt and form a compact object are discussed.

Implications suggest black holes may not be the only end state of massive star collapse.

Abstract

We consider a toy model for relativistic collapse of an homogeneous perfect fluid that takes into account an equation of state for high density matter, in the form of an Hagedorn phase, and semiclassical corrections in the strong field. We show that collapse reaches a critical minimum size and then bounces. We discuss the conditions for collapse to halt and form a compact object. We argue that implications of models such as the one presented here are of great importance for astrophysics as they show that black holes may not be the only final outcome of collapse of very massive stars.