Marginally outer trapped surfaces in the Schwarzschild spacetime: Multiple self-intersections and extreme mass ratio mergers
Ivan Booth, Robie A. Hennigar, Saikat Mondal
Abstract
We study the open and closed axisymmetric marginally outer trapped surfaces contained in leaves of constant Painlev\'e-Gullstrand time for Schwarzschild spacetimes. We identify a family of closed marginally outer trapped surface (MOTS) in the black hole interior characterized by an arbitrary number of self-intersections. This suggests that the self-intersecting behavior reported by Pook-Kolb et al. [Phys. Rev. D 100, 084044 (2019)] may be a far more generic phenomenon than expected. We also consider open surfaces, finding that their behavior is highly constrained but includes surfaces with multiple self-intersections inside the horizon. We argue that the behavior of open MOTS identifies and constrains the possible local behavior of MOTS during extreme mass ratio mergers.