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Abstract

To stuff a black hole. We analyze and apply an alternative to black hole excision based on smoothing the interior of black holes with arbitrary initial data, and solving the vacuum Einstein evolution equations everywhere. By deriving the constraint propagation system for our hyperbolic formulation of the BSSN evolution system we rigorously prove that the constraints propagate causally and so any constraint violations introduced inside the black holes cannot affect the exterior spacetime. We present evolutions of Cook-Pfeiffer binary black hole initial configurations showing that these techniques appear to work robustly for generic data. We also present evidence from spherically symmetric evolutions that for the gauge conditions used the same stationary end-state is approached irrespective of the choice of initial data and smoothing procedure.