Numerical investigation of black hole interiors

TL;DR

This paper numerically investigates black hole interiors, confirming that mass inflation leads to a null singularity near the inner horizon for generic initial conditions, supporting a self-consistent model of black hole singularities.

Contribution

It provides the first numerical evidence that mass inflation causes a null singularity in black hole interiors for generic initial data.

Findings

Mass inflation results in a null singularity.

The inner horizon is characterized by diverging mass function.

Numerical integration supports the mass inflation scenario.

Abstract

Gravitational perturbations which are present in any realistic stellar collapse to a black hole, die off in the exterior of the hole, but experience an infinite blueshift in the interior. This is believed to lead to a slowly contracting lightlike scalar curvature singularity, characterized by a divergence of the hole's (quasi-local) mass function along the inner horizon. The region near the inner horizon is described to great accuracy by a plane wave spacetime. While Einstein's equations for this metric are still too complicated to be solved in closed form it is relatively simple to integrate them numerically. We find for generic regular initial data the predicted mass inflation type null singularity, rather than a spacelike singularity. It thus seems that mass inflation indeed represents a generic self-consistent picture of the black hole interior.