Gravitational collapse without black holes

The contemporary notion of black hole originates in Oppenheimer and Snyder’s 1939 article “On Continued Gravitational Contraction” (Phys. Rev. 56:455, 1939). In particular, Penrose (Phys. Rev. Lett. 14:57, 1965) showed that their metric gave rise to trapped surfaces, that is regions of space from which no light rays can escape, and proved that within such surfaces black-hole formation is inevitable. Section “No trapped surfaces” of this article shows that a simple modification of the Oppenheimer-Snyder metric, fully consistent with General Relativity, may be made, so that all radial light rays originating in the interior escape to the exterior. There is no trapped surface and no black hole; on the contrary there is a stable end state with finite density, contained within a sphere of Schwarzschild radius. Implications for the interpretation of General Relativity, and also for experimental observation of supermassive objects and the Event Horizon Telescope project, are discussed in the concluding section.