Does The Principle Of Equivalence Prevent Trapped Surfaces From Being Formed In The General Relativistic Collapse Process?

Original · EN

It has been recently shown (Mitra,- astro-ph/9910408, astro-ph/0207056) that the timelike spherical collapse of a radiating, physical fluid in General Relativity, as seen by an interior co-moving observer at rest in the physical fluid, does not permit formation of ``trapped surfaces''. This followed from the fact that the formation of a trapped surface in a physical fluid would cause the timelike world lines of the collapsing fluid to become null at the would be trapped surface, thus violating the Principle of Equivalence in General Theory of Relativity. In this paper we generalize and extend this result by studying the problem from the point of view of the exterior Vaidya metric of a collapsing radiating fluid as seen by an exterior stationary observer, and find that the "no trapped surface condition" becomes g00 > 0 consistent with that obtained for the interior co-moving metric. Since we have shown that the Principle of Equivalence prevents trapped surfaces from being formed in collapsing, radiating objects, then true event horizons cannot exist and Galactic Black Hole Candidates (GBHC) must have physically observable intrinsic magnetic dipole moments. Because of this fact it follows (Robertson and Leiter - astro-ph/0102381, astro-ph/0208333) that GBHC can be consistently described, within the framework of General Relativity, in terms of a magneto-spheric eternally collapsing objects (MECO) without true event horizons.