On gravastar formation: What can be the evidence of a black hole?

TL;DR

This paper explores the possibility that what appears as black holes might actually be gravastars, discussing observational challenges and theoretical scenarios where black hole formation could be prevented, especially if energy conditions are violated.

Contribution

It proposes a scenario where the final state of gravitational collapse is a gravastar instead of a black hole, challenging the traditional interpretation of black hole observations.

Findings

Physical signals around collapsing objects mimic black holes.

Formation of gravastars could be indistinguishable from black holes observationally.

Such scenarios require significant violation of energy conditions.

Abstract

Any observer outside black holes cannot detect any physical signal produced by the black holes themselves, since, by definition, the black holes are not located in the causal past of the outside observer. In fact, what we regard as black hole candidates in our view are not black holes but will be gravitationally contracting objects. As well known, a black hole will form by a gravitationally collapsing object in the infinite future in the views of distant observers like us. At the very late stage of the gravitational collapse, the gravitationally contracting object behaves as a black body due to its gravity. Due to this behavior, the physical signals produced around it (e.g. the quasi-normal ringings and the shadow image) will be very similar to those caused in the eternal black hole spacetime. However those physical signals do not necessarily imply the formation of a black hole in the future, since we cannot rule out the possibility that the formation of the black hole is prevented by some unexpected event in the future yet unobserved. As such an example, we propose a scenario in which the final state of the gravitationally contracting spherical thin shell is a gravastar that has been proposed as a final configuration alternative to a black hole by Mazur and Mottola. This scenario implies that time necessary to observe the moment of the gravastar formation can be much longer than the lifetime of the present civilization, although such a scenario seems to be possible only if the dominant energy condition is largely violated.