Stable gravastars—an alternative to black holes?

Abstract. The “gravastar ” picture developed by Mazur and Mottola is one of a very small number of serious challenges to our usual conception of a “black hole”. In the gravastar picture there is effectively a phase transition at / near where the event horizon would have been expected to form, and the interior of what would have been the black hole is replaced by a segment of de Sitter space. While Mazur and Mottola were able to argue for the thermodynamic stability of their configuration, the question of dynamic stability against spherically symmetric perturbations of the matter or gravity fields remains somewhat obscure. In this article we construct a model that shares the key features of the Mazur–Mottola scenario, and which is sufficiently simple for a full dynamical analysis. We find that there are some physically reasonable equations of state for the transition layer that lead to stability.