Destroying black holes with test bodies

Abstract

If a black hole can accrete a body whose spin or charge would send the black hole parameters over the extremal limit, then a naked singularity would presumably form, in violation of the cosmic censorship conjecture. We review some previous results on testing cosmic censorship in this way using the test body approximation, focusing mostly on the case of neutral black holes. Under certain conditions a black hole can indeed be over-spun or over-charged in this approximation, hence radiative and self-force effects must be taken into account to further test cosmic censorship.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the First Mediterranean Conference on Classical and Quantum Gravity (talk given by T. P. S.). Summarizes the results of Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 141101 (2009), arXiv:0907.4146 [gr-qc] and considers further example