Relativistic Charged Spheres II: Regularity and Stability

Abstract

We present new results concerning the existence of static, electrically charged, perfect fluid spheres that have a regular interior and are arbitrarily close to a maximally charged black-hole state. These configurations are described by exact solutions of Einstein's field equations. A family of these solutions had already be found (de Felice et al., 1995) but here we generalize that result to cases with different charge distribution within the spheres and show, in an appropriate parameter space, that the set of such physically reasonable solutions has a non zero measure. We also perform a perturbation analysis and identify the solutions which are stable against adiabatic radial perturbations. We then suggest that the stable configurations can be considered as classic models of charged particles. Finally our results are used to show that a conjecture of Kristiansson et al. (1998) is incorrect.