Gravitational collapse and formation of universal horizons in Einstein-aether theory

Abstract

We numerically study the gravitational collapse of a massless scalar field with spherical symmetry in Einstein-aether theory, and show that apparent, spin-0 and dynamical universal horizons (dUHs) can be all formed. The spacetime and the aether field are well-behaved and regular, including regions nearby these horizons (but away from the center of spherical symmetry). The spacetime outside the apparent and spin-0 horizons settles down to a static configuration, and some of such resulting static black holes were already found numerically in the literature. On the other hand, the proper distance of the outermost dUH from the apparent (or spin-0) horizon keeps increasing on $\mbox{\ae}$ther-orthogonal time slices. This indicates that the outermost dUH is evolving into the causal boundary, even for excitations with large speeds of propagation.