Interior marginally outer trapped surfaces of spherically symmetric black holes

Abstract

There are notable similarities between the marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) present in the interior of a binary black hole merger and those present in the interior of the Schwarzschild black hole. Here we study the existence and properties of MOTSs with self-intersections in the interior of more general static and spherically symmetric black holes and coordinate systems. Our analysis is carried out in a parametrized family of Painlev\'e-Gullstrand-like coordinates that we introduce. First, for the Schwarzschild spacetime, we study the existence of these surfaces for various slicings of the spacetime finding them to be generic within the family of coordinate systems we investigate. Then, we study how an inner horizon affects the existence and properties of these surfaces by exploring examples: the Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole and the four-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet black hole. We find that an inner horizon results in a finite number of self-intersecting MOTSs, but their properties depend sensitively on the interior structure of the black hole. By analyzing the spectrum of the stability operator, we show that our results for two-horizon black holes provide exact-solution examples of recently observed properties of unstable MOTSs present in the interior of a binary black hole merger, such as the sequence of bifurcations/annihilations that lead to the disappearance of apparent horizons.