Cosmic Censorship: Formation of a Shielding Horizon Around a Fragile Horizon

Understand

The weak cosmic censorship conjecture asserts that spacetime singularities that arise in gravitational collapse are always hidden inside of black holes, invisible to distant observers.

• This conjecture, put forward by Penrose more than four decades ago, is widely believed to be one of the basic principles of nature.
• However, a complete proof of this hypothesis is still lacking and the validity of the conjecture has therefore remained one of the most important open questions in general relativity.
• In this study we analyze a gedanken experiment which is designed to challenge cosmic censorship by trying to overcharge a Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole: a charged shell is lowered {\it adiabatically} into the charged black hole.