Abstract
Building on a famous idea by Hawking, Vaz won second prize in the Gravity Research Foundation essay contest in 2014 by demonstrating that quantum gravitational collapse does not lead to a singularity hidden by the event horizon, but rather to the formation of a thin spherical shell of condensed matter on the Schwarzschild surface. This surface was therefore revealed to be an apparent rather than a real horizon. This completely new view of black holes (BHs) was also consistent with Einstein’s 1939 idea of the localization of collapsing particles within a thin spherical shell. This "gravitational atom" is not supported by any degeneracy pressure, but by quantum gravity, just as ordinary atoms are supported by quantum mechanics. After determining the potential energy for these thin spherical shells of condensed matter at the apparent horizon in the theory of general relativity, one demonstrates here that these BHs are quantum objects obeying Schrödinger theory in the non-relativistic case and Dirac theory in the relativistic case, generalizing previous results. On the one hand, the results obtained have profound implications for the BH information paradox; on the other, they also agree excellently with astrophysical observations of rotating BHs. In fact, data from 20 rotating BHs, whether of stellar origin, located at the hearts of certain galaxies, or identified through gravitational-wave astronomy, are analyzed. All 20 were found to be highly excited quantum states, gravitational spinor solutions of the Dirac equation for particular values of the principal quantum number and the total angular momentum quantum number.