Related papers: Traversable wormholes and light rings
We show that in quadratic gravity sufficiently light objects must be horizonless and construct explicit analytic examples of horizonless ultracompact objects (UCOs), which are more compact than Schwarzschild black holes. Due to the…
We study the existence of light rings (LR's) and timelike circular orbits (TCO's) in spherically symmetric, asymptotically flat wormhole geometries. We use a purely geometric approach based in the intrinsic curvatures of a $2$-dimensional…
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…
For a stationary, axisymmetric, asymptotically flat, ultra-compact [$i.e.$ containing light-rings (LRs)] object, with a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ north-south symmetry fixing an equatorial plane, we establish that the structure of timelike circular…
The rapid progress in gravitational wave astronomy has provided an opportunity for investigating the presence of long-range scalar forces that exclusively manifest around astrophysical black holes. In this paper, we explore a new…
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…
Spherically symmetric bosonic stars are one of the few examples of gravitating solitons that are known to form dynamically, via a classical process of (incomplete) gravitational collapse. As stationary solutions of the…
It has been argued that ultracompact objects, which possess light rings but no horizons, may be unstable against gravitational perturbations. To test this conjecture, we revisit the quasi-black hole solutions, a family of horizonless…
In the framework of a collisionless dark matter fluid which is non-minimally coupled to gravity, we investigate the existence and properties of static, spherically symmetric solutions of the general relativistic field equations. We show…
Black hole mimickers (BHMs) are horizonless globally regular ultracompact relativistic self-gravitating objects (UCOs) of mass $M$ and radius $R$ with compactness $C = M/R$ higher than that of a neutron star and that produce an effective…
The number and position of unstable critical curves, as well as the nature of the accretion disk around compact objects, play a fundamental role in their optical appearance. Identifying differences in the optical spectrum of various…
We present an unified approach for the study of idealized gravitational compact objects like wormholes and horizonless stars, here simulated by the presence of boundary conditions at a deeply inner wall. At classical level, namely…
The optical appearance of a body compact enough to feature an unstable bound orbit, when surrounded by an accretion disk, is expected to be dominated by a luminous ring of radiation enclosing a central brightness depression typically known…
The black hole paradigm, while remarkably successful, raises fundamental questions-both classical and quantum-about the nature of spacetime, horizons, and singularities. Black hole mimickers, horizonless ultra-compact objects, have emerged…
Viable alternatives to astrophysical black holes include hyper-compact objects without horizon, such as gravastars, boson stars, wormholes and superspinars. The authors have recently shown that typical rapidly-spinning gravastars and boson…
In this talk I discuss pertinence of the wormholes to the problem of circumventing the light speed barrier and present a specific class of wormholes. The wormholes of this class are static and have arbitrarily wide throats, which makes them…
Traversable wormholes (TWHs) remain one of the most intriguing predictions of General Relativity (GR), offering passage through space-time. However, their existence requires the violation of the null energy condition, making their detection…
We argue that one can nucleate a traversable wormhole via a nonperturbative process in quantum gravity. To support this, we construct spacetimes in which there are instantons giving a finite probability for a test cosmic string to break and…
To what extent are all astrophysical, dark, compact objects both black holes (BHs) and described by the Kerr geometry? We embark on the exercise of defying the universality of this remarkable idea, often called the "Kerr hypothesis". After…
Recently it has been argued that the phantom thin-shell wormholes matched with the Schwarzschild space-time near the Schwarzschild radius ring like Schwarzschild black holes at early times, but differently at late times (arXiv:1602.07309).…