This market refers to the paper "Do Black Holes Exist?" by Leonardo Modesto, Edoardo Rattu.
An answer resolves to Yes if the paper is accepted to be published in that journal before the end of 2026. (The paper does not have to be published by the end of 2026; it only needs to be accepted.)
1,000Claude segment – "
The provocative title "Do Black Holes Exist?" oversells the conclusion. A few important caveats:
The McVittie solution represents a very specific setup: a point mass in a perfect-fluid FLRW background. It is not the only possible model of a black hole in the universe.
In the pure Schwarzschild case (H = 0, H' = 0), the problem vanishes — r = 2M is a regular event horizon as usual. The singularity only appears in the cosmological embedding.
Black holes can form dynamically (stellar collapse, etc.) and other solutions — like the Oppenheimer-Snyder collapse model — don't share this pathology.
The curvature singularity is described as "not analytic" with respect to H'(t): for arbitrarily small but nonzero H', the curvature invariants are singular, but for H'= 0 they are not. arXiv This is a mathematically sharp result, but it means the pathology requires cosmological dynamics and doesn't afflict static black holes.
Bottom line
The technical content appears internally consistent and raises a genuine, interesting issue about the McVittie solution. It's a real contribution to the study of black holes in cosmological spacetimes. However, the leap from "this particular exact solution has a singularity at r = 2M in an expanding universe" to "black holes don't exist" is a significant overreach. The result is more accurately a statement about the difficulty of embedding a black hole cleanly in a dynamical cosmology, not a refutation of black holes in general.
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However, does this mean it's unlikely to be accepted if it contains reasonable maths and science?