Speaker: Ramy Brustein
Title: What’s inside a black hole?
I will present general arguments, based on fundamental physics principles, as to why we should expect a significant, horizon scale, departure from semiclassical gravity inside astrophysical black holes. Then, I will present a simple model which realizes this idea: the frozen star model. I will show that a static frozen star looks exactly like a Schwarzschild black hole to an external observer and that it is sourced by a “string fluid”. Then I will show that frozen stars can form dynamically from collapsing “normal” matter via a quantum phase transition. The duration of this transition is estimated and shown to be consistent with causality.