NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF BLACK-HOLE INTERIORS

Gravitational perturbations which are present in any realistic stellar collapse to a black hole die off in the exterior of the hole but expe rience an infinite blueshift in the interior. This is believed to lead to a slowly contracting lightlike scalar curvature singularity, chara cterized by a divergence of the hole's (quasilocal) mass function alon g the inner horizon. The region near the inner horizon is described wi th great accuracy by a plane wave spacetime. While Einstein's equation s for this metric are still too complicated to be solved in closed for m, it is relatively simple to integrate them numerically, which we do here. For generic, regular initial data, we find the predicted mass in flation-type null singularity, rather than a spacelike singularity. It , therefore, seems that mass inflation indeed represents a generic sel f-consistent picture of the black hole interior.