We examine potential deformations of inner black hole and cosmological horizons in Reissner-Nordstrom de-Sitter spacetimes. While the rigidity of the outer black hole horizon is guaranteed by theorem, that theorem applies to neither the inner black hole nor past cosmological horizon. Further for pure deSitter spacetime it is clear that the cosmological horizon can be deformed (by translation). For specific parameter choices, it is shown that both inner black hole and cosmological horizons can be infinitesimally deformed. However these do not extend to finite deformations. The corresponding results for general spherically symmetric spacetimes are considered.
We have shown previously that a merger of marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) occurs in a binary black hole merger and that there is a continuous sequence of MOTSs which connects the initial two black holes to the final one. In this paper, we confirm this scenario numerically and we detail further improvements in the numerical methods for locating MOTSs. With these improvements, we confirm the merger scenario and demonstrate the existence of self-intersecting MOTSs formed in the immediate aftermath of the merger. These results will allow us to track physical quantities across the non-linear merger process and to potentially infer properties of the merger from gravitational wave observations.
We study a marginally stable circular orbit (MSCO) such as the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) of a timelike geodesic in any spherically symmetric and static spacetime. It turns out that the metric components are separable from the constants of motion along geodesics. We show also that a metric component $g_{rr}$ with a radial coordinate $r$ does not affect MSCOs. This suggests that, as a test of gravity, any ISCO measurement may be put into the same category as gravitational redshift experiments. MSCOs for exact solutions to the Einsteins equation are also mentioned.
Based on the geometry of the codimension-2 surface in a general spherically symmetric spacetime, we give a quasi-local definition of a photon sphere as well as a photon surface. This new definition is the generalization of the one by Claudel, Virbhadra, and Ellis but without reference to any umbilical hypersurface in the spacetime. The new definition effectively rules out the photon surface which has noting to do with gravity. The application of the definition to the Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) model of gravitational collapse reduces to a problem of a second order differential equation. We find that the energy balance on the boundary of the dust ball can provide one appropriate boundary condition to this equation. Based on this key investigation, we find an analytic photon surface solution in the Oppenheimer-Snyder (OS) model and reasonable numerical solutions for the marginally bounded collapse in the LTB model. Interestingly, in the OS model, we find that the time difference between the occurrence of the photon surface and the event horizon is mainly determined by the total mass of the system but not the size or the strength of gravitational field of the system.
We consider here the existence and structure of trapped surfaces, horizons and singularities in spherically symmetric static massless scalar field spacetimes. Earlier studies have shown that there exists no event horizon in such spacetimes if the scalar field is asymptotically flat. We extend this result here to show that this is true in general for spherically symmetric static massless scalar field spacetimes, whether the scalar field is asymptotically flat or not. Other general properties and certain important features of these models are also discussed.
We present a framework for studying gravitational lensing in spherically symmetric spacetimes using 1+1+2 covariant methods. A general formula for the deflection angle is derived and we show how this can be used to recover the standard result for the Schwarzschild spacetime.