Vacuum Breakdown near a Black Hole Charged by Hypercritical Accretion

Abstract

We consider a black hole accreting spherically from the surrounding medium. If accretion produces a luminosity close to the Eddington limit the hole acquires a net charge so that electrons and ions can fall with the same velocity. The condition for the electrostatic field to be large enough to break the vacuum near the hole horizon translates into an upper limit for the hole mass, $M\sim 6.6\times 10^{20}\mathrm{g}.$ The astrophysical conditions under which this phaenomenon can take place are rather extreme, but in principle they could be met by a mini black hole residing at the center of a star.

6 pages, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (2)

• The elusiveness of old neutron stars
• Hot Atmospheres Around Accreting Neutron Stars: A Possible Source For Hard X--ray Emission

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Nonadiabatic charged spherical gravitational collapse
• Magnetic and electric properties of quantum vacuum
• All spherically symmetric charged anisotropic solutions for compact star
• Black holes as antimatter factories
• Tolman-Bayin type static charged fluid spheres in general relativity
• No nearby counterparts to the moving objects in the Hubble Deep Field
• Charged compact stellar model in Finch-Skea spacetime
• Lack of Debye and Meissner screening in strongly magnetized quark matter at intermediate densities
• Radiative acceleration and transient, radiation-induced electric fields
• Electromagnetic Energy for a Charged Kerr Black Hole in a Uniform Magnetic Field
• Conversion of protons to positrons by a black hole