A degenerate extension of the Schwarzschild exterior

Abstract

We present vacuum spacetime solutions of first order gravity, which are described by the exterior Schwarzschild geometry in one region and by degenerate tetrads in the other. The invertible and noninvertible phases of the tetrad meet at an intermediate boundary across which the components of the metric, affine connection and field-strength are all continuous. Within the degenerate spacetime region, the noninvertibility of the tetrad leads to nonvanishing torsion. In contrast to the Schwarzschild spacetime which is the unique spherically symmetric solution of Einsteinian gravity, all the field-strength components associated with these vacuum geometries remain finite everywhere.