Test bodies and naked singularities: is the self-force the cosmic censor?

Abstract

Jacobson and Sotiriou showed that rotating black holes could be spun-up past the extremal limit by the capture of non-spinning test bodies, if one neglects radiative and self-force effects. This would represent a violation of the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture in four-dimensional, asymptotically flat spacetimes. We show that for some of the trajectories giving rise to naked singularities, radiative effects can be neglected. However, for these orbits the conservative self-force is important, and seems to have the right sign to prevent the formation of naked singularities.

4 pages, 1 table. Phys. Rev. Lett. in press. Substantially improved version, showing that the conservative self-force's sign is the right one to prevent the formation of naked singularities for all orbits

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Destroying a near-extremal Kerr-Newman black hole
• Collision of two general geodesic particles around a Kerr black hole
• Acceleration of particles by black holes -- general explanation
• Gravitational perturbation of the BTZ black hole induced by test particles and weak cosmic censorship in AdS spacetime
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