Related papers: Instability of hyper-compact Kerr-like objects
Ultra-compact, horizonless objects such as gravastars, boson stars, wormholes and superspinars can mimick most of the properties of black holes. Here we show that these "black hole mimickers" will most likely develop a strong ergoregion…
Most of the properties of black holes can be mimicked by horizonless compact objects such as gravastars and boson stars. We show that these ultra-compact objects develop a strong ergoregion instability when rapidly spinning. Instability…
Superspinars are ultracompact objects whose mass M and angular momentum J violate the Kerr bound (cJ/GM^2>1). Recent studies analyzed the observable consequences of gravitational lensing and accretion around superspinars in astrophysical…
Ultracompact objects with light-rings (LRs) but without an event horizon could mimic black holes (BHs) in their strong gravity phenomenology. But are such objects dynamically viable? Stationary and axisymmetric ultracompact objects that can…
Ultracompact objects are self-gravitating systems with a light ring. It was recently suggested that fluctuations in the background of these objects are extremely long-lived and might turn unstable at the nonlinear level, if the object is…
The existence of cosmological compact objects with very strong gravity is a prediction of General Relativity and an exact solution of the Einstein equations. These objects are called black holes and recently we had the first observations of…
Direct observation of black holes is one of the grand challenges in astronomy. If there are super-compact objects which possess unstable circular orbits of photons, however, it may be difficult to distinguish them from black holes by…
The ergoregion instability is known to affect very compact objects that rotate very rapidly and do not possess a horizon. We present here a detailed analysis on the relevance of the ergoregion instability for the viability of gravastars.…
Gravitational-wave astronomy can give us access to the structure of black holes, potentially probing microscopic or even Planckian corrections at the horizon scale, as those predicted by some quantum-gravity models of exotic compact…
It has long been known that, in higher-dimensional general relativity, there are black hole solutions with an arbitrarily large angular momentum for a fixed mass. We examine the geometry of the event horizon of such ultra-spinning black…
Exotic compact objects with physical surfaces a Planckian distance away from where the horizon would have been are inspired in quantum gravity. Most of these objects are defined by a classical spacetime metric, such as boson stars,…
We show that a generic relativistic membrane with in-plane pressure and surface density having the same sign is unstable with respect to a series of warping mode instabilities with high wave numbers. We also examine the criteria of…
Recently, ultracompact objects have been found to be susceptible to a new nonlinear instability, known as the light-ring instability, triggered by stable light rings. This discovery raises concerns about the viability of these objects as…
Millimeter very long baseline interferometry will soon produce accurate images of the closest surroundings of the supermassive compact object at the center of the Galaxy, Sgr A*. These images may reveal the existence of a central faint…
Spinning horizonless compact objects may be unstable against an 'ergoregion instability'. We investigate this mechanism for electromagnetic perturbations of ultracompact Kerr-like objects with a reflecting surface, extending previous…
Regular black holes and horizonless black-hole mimickers offer mathematically consistent alternatives to address the challenges posed by standard black holes. However, the formation mechanism of these alternative objects is still largely…
Gravitational waves from compact objects provide information about their structure, probing deep into strong-gravity regions. Here we illustrate how the presence or absence of an event horizon can produce qualitative differences in the…
Compact bosonic field configurations, or boson stars, are promising dark matter candidates which have been invoked as an alternative description for the supermassive compact objects in active galactic nuclei. Boson stars can be comparable…
We solve Einstein's equations for slowly-rotating gravitational condensate stars (gravastars) up to second order in the rotation by expanding about the spherically symmetric gravastar with de Sitter interior and Schwarzschild exterior…
The Event Horizon Telescope's image of the M87 black hole provides an exciting opportunity to study black hole physics. Since a black hole's event horizon absorbs all electromagnetic waves, it is difficult to actively probe the horizon's…