Apparent motion of a spherical shell collapsing onto a black hole

Abstract

We model the collapse of a spherically symmetric, constant density, pressureless shell onto a preexisting black hole. Contrary to a recent claim of Liu and Zhang (2009), we show that an observer at infinity never sees any part of the shell cross the event horizon. The entire shell appears to “freeze” outside the black hole. We find that during intermediate stages of the collapse, the change in apparent size of the inner surface is non-monotonic. However, at late times, the apparent sizes of the inner and outer surfaces of the shell both approach 33GM/c2 asymptotically, where M is the combined mass of the initial black hole and the shell.