Horizon avoidance in spherically-symmetric collapse

Abstract

We study collapse of evaporating spherically-symmetric thin dust shells and dust balls assuming that quantum effects are encapsulated in a spherically-symmetric metric that satisfied mild regularity conditions. The evaporation may accelerate collapse, but for a generic metric the Schwarzschild radius is not crossed. Instead the shell (or the layer in the ball of dust) is always at a certain sub-Planckian distance from it.