Bye Bye, BlackHole?

Einstein didn't believe in black holes, and neither did Oppenheimer. A new paper today, http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0509007, looks to me like a possible confirmation of their intuition, if it's correct. Andreas Aste and Dirk Trautman find that:

A test particle falling into a classical black hole crosses the event horizon and ends up in the singularity within finite eigentime. In the ‘more realistic’ case of a ‘classical’ evaporating black hole, an observer falling onto a black hole observes a sudden evaporation of the hole. This illustrates the fact that the discussion of the classical process commonly found in the literature may become obsolete when the black hole has a finite lifetime...

The description of the evaporating black-hole is the semi-classical Hawking-Unruh description, so that the real physics near the horizon is of course not understood, but I found the result highly suggestive. Also suggestive is this recent paper http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0508048 by Christian Fronsdal. Fronsdal doesn't consider evaporation, but he also finds that BH have a tough time actually forming - the tough part is for the matter to actually get inside its Schwarzschild radius.

Both papers seem to me to suggest that while apparent black holes (objects that look like black holes from far away) no doubt exist, the long discredited "frozen star" picture might actually be more appropriate. Of course these frozen stars would be quite hot if you got close to them.

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