Test bodies and naked singularities: is the self-force the cosmic censor?

Abstract

Jacobson and Sotiriou showed that rotating black holes could be spun-up past the extremal limit by the capture of non-spinning test bodies, if one neglects radiative and self-force effects. This would represent a violation of the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture in four-dimensional, asymptotically flat spacetimes. We show that for some of the trajectories giving rise to naked singularities, radiative effects can be neglected. However, for these orbits the conservative self-force is important, and seems to have the right sign to prevent the formation of naked singularities.

Comments: 4 pages, 1 table. Phys. Rev. Lett. in press. Substantially improved version, showing that the conservative self-force's sign is the right one to prevent the formation of naked singularities for all orbits