Averaging the Schwarzschild spacetime

Abstract

We tried to average the Schwarzschild solution for the gravitational point source by analogy with the same problem in Newtonian gravity or electrostatics. We expected to get a similar result, consisting of two parts: a smoothed interior part being a sphere filled with some matter content and an empty exterior part described by the original solution. We considered several variants of generally covariant averaging schemes. The averaging of the connection in the spirit of Zalaletdinov's macroscopic gravity gave unsatisfactory results. With the transport operators proposed in the literature it did not give the expected Schwarzschild solution in the exterior part of the averaged spacetime. We were able to construct a transport operator which preserves the Newtonian analogy for the outward region but such an operator does not have a clear geometrical meaning.In contrast, using the curvature as the primary averaged object instead of the connection does give the desired result for the exterior part of the problem in a fine way. However for the interior part, this curvature averaging does not work because the Schwarzschild curvature components diverge as 1/r 3 near the center and therefore are not integrable.