Regular black holes from Oppenheimer-Snyder collapse

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that regular black holes can result from the gravitational collapse of dust stars within higher-curvature gravity theories, leading to bounce phenomena and singularity resolution in cosmology.

Contribution

It shows that regular black holes emerge naturally from dust collapse in generalized gravity theories, extending previous static solutions to dynamical collapse scenarios.

Findings

Stars collapse to a minimum size before bouncing back.

Black hole singularities are replaced by regular cores.

Cosmological models exhibit smooth bounces instead of singularities.

Abstract

It has been recently shown that regular black holes arise as the unique spherically symmetric solutions of broad families of generalizations of Einstein gravity involving infinite towers of higher-curvature corrections in $D\geq 5$ spacetime dimensions. In this paper we argue that such regular black holes arise as the byproduct of the gravitational collapse of pressureless dust stars. We show that, just like for Einstein gravity, the modified junction conditions for these models impose that the dust particles on the star surface follow geodesic trajectories on the corresponding black hole background. Generically, in these models the star collapses until it reaches a minimum size (and a maximum density) inside the inner horizon of the black hole it creates. Then, it bounces back and reappears through a white hole in a different universe, where it eventually reaches its original size and restarts the process. Along the way, we study FLRW cosmologies in the same theories that regularize black hole singularities. We find that the cosmological evolution is completely smooth, with the big bang and big crunch singularities predicted by Einstein gravity replaced by cosmological bounces.