The evaporation of black holes raises a number of conceptual issues, most of them related to the final stages of evaporation, where the interplay between the central singularity and Hawking radiation cannot be ignored. Regular models of black holes replace the central singularity with a nonsingular spacetime region, in which an effective classical geometric description is available. It has been argued that these models provide an effective, but complete, description of the evaporation of black holes at all times up to their eventual disappearance. However, here we point out that known models fail to be self-consistent: the regular core is exponentially unstable against perturbations with a finite timescale, while the evaporation time is infinite, therefore making the instability impossible to prevent. We also discuss how to overcome these difficulties, highlighting that this can be done only at the price of accepting that these models cannot be fully predictive regarding the final stages of evaporation.

The 1965 Penrose singularity theorem demonstrates the utterly inevitable and unavoidable formation of spacetime singularities under physically reasonable assumptions, and it remains one of the main results in our understanding of black holes. It is standard lore that quantum gravitational effects will always tame these singularities in black hole interiors. However, the Penrose’s theorem provides no clue as to the possible (nonsingular) geometries that may be realized in theories beyond general relativity as the result of singularity regularization. In this paper, we analyze this problem in spherically symmetric situations, being completely general otherwise, in particular regarding the dynamics of the gravitational and matter fields. Our main result is that, contrary to what one might expect, the set of regular geometries that arises is remarkably limited. We rederive geometries that have been analyzed before, but also uncover some new possibilities. Moreover, the complete catalog of possibilities that we obtain allows us to draw the novel conclusion that there is a clear tradeoff between internal and external consistency: one has to choose between models that display internal inconsistencies, or models that include significant deviations with respect to general relativity, which should therefore be amenable to observational tests via multimessenger astrophysics.

While singularities are inevitable in the classical theory of general relativity, it is commonly believed that they will not be present when quantum gravity effects are taken into account in a consistent framework. In particular, the structure of black holes should be modified in frameworks beyond general relativity that aim at regularizing singularities. Being agnostic on the nature of such theory, in this paper we classify the possible alternatives to classical black holes and provide a minimal set of phenomenological parameters that describe their characteristic features. The introduction of these parameters allows us to study, in a largely model-independent manner and taking into account all the relevant physics, the phenomenology associated with these quantum-modified black holes. We perform an extensive analysis of different observational channels and obtain the most accurate characterization of the viable constraints that can be placed using current data. Aside from facilitating a critical revision of previous work, this analysis also allows us to highlight how different channels are capable of probing certain features but are oblivious to others, and pinpoint the theoretical aspects that should be addressed in order to strengthen these tests.

Regular black holes with nonsingular cores have been considered in several approaches to quantum gravity, and as agnostic frameworks to address the singularity problem and Hawking’s information paradox. While in a recent work we argued that the inner core is destabilized by linear perturbations, opposite claims were raised that regular black holes have in fact stable cores. To reconcile these arguments, we discuss a generalization of the geometrical framework, originally applied to Reissner-Nordtsröm black holes by Ori, and show that regular black holes have an exponentially growing Misner-Sharp mass at the inner horizon. This result can be taken as an indication that stable nonsingular black hole spacetimes are not the definitive endpoint of a quantum gravity regularization mechanism, and that nonperturbative backreation effects must be taken into account in order to provide a consistent description of the quantum-gravitational endpoint of gravitational stellar collapse.

Generic models of regular black holes have separate outer and inner horizons, both with nonzero surface gravity. It has been shown that a nonzero inner horizon surface gravity results in exponential instability at the inner horizon controlled by this parameter. This phenomenon takes the name of “mass inflation instability”, and its presence has put in question the physical viability of regular black holes as alternatives to their (singular) general relativity counterparts. In this paper, we show that it is possible to make the inner horizon surface gravity vanish, while maintaining the separation between horizons, and a non-zero outer horizon surface gravity. We construct specific geometries satisfying these requirements, and analyze their behavior under different kinds of perturbations, showing that the exponential growth characteristic of mass inflation instability is not present for these geometries. These “inner-extremal” regular black holes are thereby better behaved than singular black holes and generic regular black holes, thus providing a well-motivated alternative of interest for fundamental and phenomenological studies.

Black hole spectroscopy with gravitational waves is an important tool to measure the mass and spin of astrophysical black holes and to test their Kerr nature. Next-generation ground- and space-based detectors will observe binary black hole mergers with large signal-to-noise ratios and perform spectroscopy routinely. It was recently shown that small perturbations due, e.g., to environmental effects (the “flea”) to the effective potential governing gravitational-wave generation and propagation in black hole exteriors (the “elephant”) can lead to arbitrarily large changes in the black hole’s quasinormal spectrum, including the fundamental mode, which is expected to dominate the observed signal. This raises an important question: is the black hole spectroscopy program robust against perturbations? We clarify the physical behavior of time-domain signals under small perturbations in the potential, and we show that changes in the amplitude of the fundamental mode in the prompt ringdown signal are parametrically small. This implies that the fundamental quasinormal mode extracted from the observable time-domain signal is stable against small perturbations. The stability of overtones deserves further investigation.