Gravitational Condensate Stars: An Alternative to Black Holes

A new final endpoint of complete gravitational collapse is proposed. By extending the concept of Bose–Einstein condensation to gravitational systems, a static, spherically symmetric solution to Einstein’s equations is obtained, characterized by an interior de Sitter region of $p=-\rho$ gravitational vacuum condensate and an exterior Schwarzschild geometry of arbitrary total mass M. These are separated by a phase boundary with a small but finite thickness ℓ, replacing both the Schwarzschild and de Sitter classical horizons. The resulting collapsed cold, compact object has no singularities, no event horizons, and a globally defined Killing time. Its entropy is maximized under small fluctuations and is given by the standard hydrodynamic entropy of the thin shell, which is of order $k_B\ell Mc/\hslash$, instead of the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy, $S_{BH}=4\pi k_{B}G{M}^2/\hslash c$. Unlike BHs, a collapsed star of this kind is consistent with quantum theory, thermodynamically stable, and suffers from no information paradox.