Looking inside a black hole
The cosmic censorship conjecture posits that singularities forming to the future of a regular Cauchy surface are hidden by an event horizon. Consequently any topological structures will ultimately collapse within the horizon of a black hole and so no observer can actively probe them classically. We consider here a quantum analogue of this problem, in which we compare the transition rates of an Unruh–DeWitt detector placed outside the horizon of an eternal BTZ black hole and its associated geon counterpart. We find the transition rates differ, with the latter being time-dependent, implying that we are indeed able to probe the structure of the singularity from outside the horizon.