Building Cosmological Frozen Stars

TL;DR

This paper develops methods to construct cosmological JNW spacetimes, which are dynamical solutions with scalar fields that generalize black holes in expanding universes, filling a gap in understanding dynamical black holes in cosmology.

Contribution

The authors introduce two generalized dimensional reduction schemes to build cosmological JNW spacetimes from static higher-dimensional solutions, covering the entire parameter space.

Findings

Successfully constructed cosmological JNW solutions from static branes.

Provided a framework to explore cosmological black hole analogs with scalar fields.

Highlighted the importance of these solutions for understanding dynamical black holes in cosmology.

Abstract

Janis-Newman-Winicour (JNW) spacetimes generalize the Schwarzschild solution to include a massless scalar field. Although suffering from naked singularities, they share the `frozen star' features of Schwarzschild black holes. Cosmological versions of the JNW spacetimes were discovered some time ago by Husain, Martinez and Nunez and by Fonarev. Unlike Schwarzschild-deSitter black holes, these solutions are dynamical, and the scarcity of exact solutions for dynamical black holes in cosmological backgrounds motivates their further study. Here we show how the cosmological JNW spacetimes can be built, starting from simpler, static, higher dimensional, vacuum `JNW brane' solutions via two different generalized dimensional reduction schemes that together cover the full range of JNW parameter space. Cosmological versions of a BPS limit of charged dilaton black holes are also known. JNW spacetimes represent a different limiting case of the charged, dilaton black hole family. We expect that understanding this second data point may be key to finding cosmological versions of general, non-BPS black holes.