Horizons and the cosmological constant

Abstract

A new solution of the Einstein equations for the point mass immersed in the de Sitter Universe is presented. The properties of the metric are very different from both the Schwarzschild black hole and the de Sitter Universe: it is everywhere smooth, light can propagate outward through the horizon, there is an antitrapped surface enclosing the point mass and there is necessarily an initial singularity. The solution for any positive cosmological constant is qualitatively different from the Schwarzschild solution and is not its continuous deformation.