In recent work by the author it was found that there is an absence of diffeomorphism symmetry for black hole horizons constrained by the causal structure of spacetime. This absence puts stringent constraints on the black hole spacetime manifold, topology, and smoothness. In particular, it suggests that such manifolds may have only continuity of data but no differentiability. In mathematics, this is described as a spacetime manifold with a C0 structure, and the assumption of smoothness as a C∞ structure might not hold. Previously, we supposed that the spacetime manifold may have a Finsler structure and might not be a homogeneous manifold, thus requiring new insights to study black hole spacetime. Investigating the spacetime manifold picture, we presume a mathematical concept called stratification of spacetime with smooth gluing of manifold data as an essential criterion for understanding the topology of black hole spacetime. In basic terms, stratification is a way of gluing spacetime into a collection of disjoint regions called strata such that the strata themselves are smooth, but the whole manifold may or may not have a differentiable structure. The topology of the spacetime manifold then depends on the criteria used for the process called stratification of spacetime. We investigate these and relatable ideas further in this paper. For smooth readability, we have referenced relevant literature grouped by topics or subtopics throughout the text.
| Published in | American Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics (Volume 13, Issue 1) |
| DOI | 10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14 |
| Page(s) | 45-58 |
| Creative Commons |
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Copyright |
Copyright © The Author(s), 2026. Published by Science Publishing Group |
Black Holes, Stratified Geometry, Fiber Bundles, Null Hypersurfaces, Horizon Smoothness, Causal Structure
| [1] | S. D. Mathur, “The information paradox: a pedagogical introduction,” Classical and Quantum Gravity, vol. 26, no. 22, p. 224001, Oct. 2009. |
| [2] | A. Almheiri, D. Marolf, J. Polchinski, and J. Sully, “Black holes: complementarity or firewalls?” Journal of High Energy Physics, vol. 2013, no. 2, p. 062, Feb. 2013. |
| [3] | A. Almheiri, D. Marolf, J. Polchinski, D. Stanford, and J. Sully, “An apologia for firewalls,” Journal of High Energy Physics, vol. 2013, no. 9, p. 018, Sep. 2013. |
| [4] | S. Singh, “Absence of Diffeomorphism Symmetry for Black Hole Spacetime: A Prelude to Black Hole Spacetime Being a Smooth Finsler Manifold,” American Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 68-89, 2025. |
| [5] | S. W. Hawking, “Black Holes in General Relativity,” Communications in Mathematical Physics, vol. 25, pp.152- 166, 1972. |
| [6] | E. Poisson, A relativist’s toolkit: The mathematics of Black Hole Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 2004. |
| [7] | G. J. Galloway, “Null Geometry and Einstein Equations,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Mathematical Relativity, 2005. |
| [8] | R. P. Geroch, “Topology in general relativity,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 782-786, 1967. |
| [9] | J. K. Beem and P. E. Ehrlich, Global Lorentzian Geometry, Marcel Dekker, 1981. |
| [10] | B. O’Neill, Semi-Riemannian Geometry, Academic Press, 1983. |
| [11] | R. Geroch, “Domain of Dependence,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 437-449, 1970. |
| [12] | G. J. Galloway, “A generalization of Hawking’s Black Hole Topology theorems to higher dimensions,” Communications in Mathematical Physics, vol. 332, no. 2, pp. 887-918, 2014. |
| [13] | M. Kunzinger and C. Samann, “Lorentzian Length spaces,” Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 399-447, 2018. |
| [14] | T. Beran, M. Kunzinger, and F. Rott, “On Curvature bounds in Lorentzian length spaces,” Advances in Mathematics, vol. 394, 2021. |
| [15] | J. Sbierski, “The C0 inextendibility of Schwarzschild spacetime and the spacelike diameter in Lorentzian geometry,” Communications in Mathematical Physics, vol. 354, no. 2, pp. 731-743, 2017. |
| [16] | L. G. Heveling, “Causality and time in Non-smooth Lorentzian Geometry,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2016. |
| [17] | M. Mars and J. M. M. Senovilla, “Geometries for General Hypersurfaces in Spacetimes Junction conditions,” Classical and Quantum Gravity, vol. 10, no. 9, pp. 1865-1897, 1993. |
| [18] | A. N. Bernal and M. Sanchez, “Further results on smoothability of Cauchy hypersurfaces and Cauchy time functions,” Letters in Mathematical Physics, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 183-197, 2006. |
| [19] | J. K. Beem, “Indefinite Finsler spaces and timelike spaces,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 1325-1329, 1979. |
| [20] | D. Bao, S.-S. Chern, and Z. Shen, An Introduction to Riemannian Finsler Geometry, Springer, 2000. |
| [21] | T. Aikou and L. Kozma, “Global aspects of Finsler Geometry,” in Handbook of Finsler Geometry, Springer, 2003. |
| [22] | W.-J. Beyn, “On a generalized notion of metrics,” Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, vol. 420, no. 2, pp. 1314-1332, 2014. |
| [23] | M. J. Pflaum, Analytic and Geometric study of Stratified spaces, American Mathematical Society, 2001. |
| [24] | M. Goresky and R. MacPherson, Stratified Morse Theory, Springer, 1988. |
| [25] | D. Trotman, “Stratification theory,” in Real and Complex Singularities, World Scientific, 2007. |
| [26] | S. Weinberger, “The topological classification of stratified spaces,” Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 334, no. 2, pp. 825-844, 1992. |
| [27] | G. Friedman, E. Hunsicker, and A. Libgober, “Topology of Stratified spaces,” Mathematical Surveys and Monographs, vol. 246, American Mathematical Society, 2021. |
| [28] | D. Ayala, J. Francis, and H. L. Tanaka, “Local structures on stratified spaces,” Advances in Mathematics, vol. 307, pp. 903-1028, 2017. |
| [29] | F. Quinn, “Homotopically Stratified sets,” Journal of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 441-499, 1988. |
| [30] | S. Basturk, “Morse theory for singular spaces,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Strasbourg, 2015. |
| [31] | D. Juniati, L. Noirel, and D. Trotman, “Whitney, Kuo-Verdier and Lipschitz Stratifications for the surfaces,” Mathematische Annalen, vol. 375, pp. 1795-1822, 2019. |
| [32] | B. Hughes, “Geometric Topology of Stratified spaces,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 365-401, 2017. |
| [33] | L. Waas and S. Yokura, “On stratification and Poset Stratified Spaces,” Journal of Singularities, vol. 20, pp. 245- 264, 2020. |
| [34] | S. Helgason, Differential Geometry, Lie Groups and Symmetric Spaces, Academic Press, 1978. |
| [35] | J. M. Lee, Introduction to Smooth Manifolds, Springer, 2012. |
| [36] | J. M. Lee, Introduction to Topological Manifolds, Springer, 2011. |
| [37] | L. W. Tu, Differential Geometry: Connections, Curvature and Characteristic classes, Springer, 2017. |
| [38] | M. W. Hirsch, Differential Topology, Springer, 1976. |
| [39] | V. Guillemin and A. Pollack, Differential Topology, Prentice-Hall, 1974. |
| [40] | J. W. Robbin and D. A. Salamon, “Introduction to differential topology,” ETH Zurich lecture notes, 2011. |
| [41] | M. Kashiwara and P. Schapira, Sheaves on Manifolds, Springer, 1990. |
| [42] | G. E. Bredon, Sheaf Theory, Springer, 1997. |
| [43] | A. Brown, S. C. di Montesano, et al., “Sheaf Theory and applications,” in Proceedings of the International Conference, 2018. |
| [44] | R. MacPherson, “Intersection Homology and perverse Sheaves,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 211-215, 1994. |
| [45] | J.-P. Brasslet, “Introduction to intersection Homology and Perverse Sheaves,” in Algebraic Cycles and Hodge Theory, Springer, 1994. |
| [46] | M. Kashiwara and P. Schapira, “IND-Sheaves,” Ast´erisque, vol. 271, 2001. |
| [47] | D. Huybrechts and M. Lehn, The geometry of moduli space of sheaves, Cambridge University Press, 2010. |
| [48] | P. Schapira, “Constructible Sheaves and functions up to infinity,” Journal of Functional Analysis, vol. 271, no. 10, pp. 2896-2923, 2016. |
| [49] | D. Nadler and E. Zaslow, “Constructible Sheaves and Fukaya Category,” Journal of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 233-286, 2009. |
| [50] | J. Milnor, Morse Theory, Princeton University Press, 1963. |
| [51] | L. I. Nicolaescu, An Invitation to Morse Theory, Springer, 2007. |
| [52] | M. Goresky, “Morse theory stratifications and sheaves,” Topology, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 291-301, 1980. |
| [53] | M. Goresky, “Introduction to the papers of R. Thom and J. Mather,” in Stratifications, Singularities and Differential Equations, Springer, 1997. |
| [54] | D. Husemoller, Fibre Bundles, Springer, 1994. |
| [55] | A. Hatcher, Vector Bundles and K-theory, unpublished notes, 2009. |
| [56] | N. Abe, “General Connections on Vector Bundles,” Journal of Mathematics of Kyoto University, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 197-225, 1980. |
| [57] | A. Bejancu and T. Otsuki, “General Finsler Connections on a Finsler Vector Bundle,” Journal of Mathematics of Kyoto University, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 1-26, 1991. |
| [58] | M. Dudek and J. Garecki, “Ehressmann Theory of connection in a principal bundle - compendium for Physicists,” International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics, vol. 15, no. 10, 2018. |
| [59] | L. Disney-Hogg, “Ehresmann, Koszul and Cartan Connections,” Master’s thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2019. |
| [60] | A. Candel and L. Conlon, Foliations I, American Mathematical Society, 2000. |
| [61] | A. Candel and L. Conlon, Foliations II, American Mathematical Society, 2003. |
| [62] | P. Tondeur, Geometry of Foliations, Birkh¨auser, 1997. |
| [63] | G. Hector and U. Hirsch, Introduction to the geometry of foliations, Vieweg, 1981. |
| [64] | B. L. Reinhart, Differential Geometry of Foliations, Springer, 1983. |
| [65] | M. Asaoka, A. El Kacimi Alaoui, S. Hurder, andK. Richardson, Foliations, Dynamics, Geometry and Topology, European Mathematical Society, 2018. |
| [66] | D. Calegari, Foliations and Geometry of 3-Manifolds, Cambridge University Press, 2003. |
| [67] | S. Mukherjee, “Foliations with geometric structures: A dissertation,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2015. |
| [68] | Y. V. Bazaikin, A. S. Galaev, and P. Gumenyuk, “Non Diffeomorphic Reeb Foliations and Modified Godbillon-Vey class,” Journal of Differential Geometry, vol. 103, no. 1, pp. 1-35, 2016. |
| [69] | A. M. Bayturaev, “On geometry of foliations of codimension 1,” Siberian Mathematical Journal, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 543-550, 1991. |
| [70] | J. W. Wood, “Foliations of Codimension 1,” Topology, vol. 13, pp. 327-334, 1974. |
| [71] | “On Completeness of foliated structures and null killing fields,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 45, no. 3, 2004. |
| [72] | A. Arvanitoyeorgos, An Introduction to Lie Groups and the Geometry of Homogeneous Spaces, American Mathematical Society, 2003. |
| [73] | W. Bertram, “Differential Geometry, Lie groups and symmetric spaces over general base fields and rings,” Advances in Mathematics, vol. 306, pp. 1-101, 2017. |
| [74] | N. Lebedeva and A. Nepechiy, “Locally Homogeneous C0 Riemannian Manifolds,” Journal of Mathematical Sciences, vol. 221, no. 6, pp. 847-859, 2017. |
| [75] | N. Lebedeva and A. Nepechiy, “Locally Homogeneous C0 Riemannian Manifolds,” St. Petersburg Mathematical Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 233-245, 2017. |
| [76] | T. Tao, “Hilbert’s Fifth problem and related topics,” Graduate Studies in Mathematics, vol. 153, American Mathematical Society, 2014. |
| [77] | R. S. Palais, “On existence of slices for actions of Non-compact Lie groups,” Annals of Mathematics, vol. 73, no. 2, pp. 295-323, 1961. |
| [78] | R. S. Palais, “The classification of G-Spaces,” Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 36, 1960. |
| [79] | A. Banyaga, The structure of Classical Diffeomorphism group, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. |
| [80] | J. W. Smith, “Fundamental Groups on a Lorentz Manifold,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 9, no. 7, pp. 1119-1122, 1968. |
| [81] | D. Burghelea and R. Lashof, “The homotopy type of the space of Diffeomorphisms. I,” Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 196, pp. 1-36, 1974. |
| [82] | A. Hatcher, “On the diffeomorphism group of S1 × S2,” Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 83, no. 2, pp. 427-430, 1981. |
| [83] | R. S. Hamilton, “The inverse Function Theorem of Nash and Moser,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 65-222, 1982. |
| [84] | J. Mather, “Notes on Topological Stability,” Harvard University lecture notes, 1970. |
| [85] | K. Katsuno, “Null Hypersurfaces in Lorentzian Manifolds 1,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 1481-1488, 1979. |
| [86] | K. Katsuno, “Null Hypersurfaces in Lorentzian Manifolds 2,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 1032-1038, 1980. |
| [87] | K. L. Duggal and A. Bejancu, Lightlike submanifolds of Semi-Riemannian Manifolds and applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. |
| [88] | G. Gupta, R. Kumar, and R. K. Nagaich, “Screen Conformal Lightlike Submanifolds of semi-Riemannian Manifolds,” Journal of Geometry and Physics, vol. 60, no. 10, pp. 1568-1579, 2010. |
| [89] | J. Jezierski, “Geometry of null hypersurfaces,” Classical and Quantum Gravity, vol. 15, no. 12, pp. 3897-3912, 1998. |
| [90] | M. Gutierrez and B. Olea, “The rigging technique for Null Hypersurfaces,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 46, no. 11, 2005. |
| [91] | M. Karimumuryango, “Induced Riemannian metric structures and Topology of Null Hypersurfaces in Lorentzian Manifolds,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2015. |
| [92] | J. Bochnak, M. Coste, and M.-F. Roy, Real Algebraic Geometry, Springer, 1998. |
| [93] | M. Coste, “Real Algebraic sets,” in Real Algebraic and Analytic Geometry, Springer, 2000. |
| [94] | D. N. Kupeli, Degenerate Manifolds, Springer, 1996. |
| [95] | J. Bognar, Indefinite Inner Product Spaces, Springer, 1974. |
| [96] | M. A. Dritschel and J. Rovnyak, “Operators on indefinite inner product spaces,” in Operator Theory, Springer, 2015. |
| [97] | T. Garidi, E. Huguet, and J. Renaud, “Krein space Quantization in curved and flat spacetime,” Physical Review D, vol. 67, no. 12, 2003. |
| [98] | O. Ferrer Villar, K. Ferrer Sotelo, and J. Cure Arenas, “Construction of spaces with an indefinite Two metric and applications,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 45, no. 12, 2004. |
| [99] | S. K. Athira, P. S. Johnson, and K. Kamaraj, “Estimates of norms on Krein spaces,” Linear Algebra and its Applications, vol. 537, pp. 221-236, 2018. |
| [100] | “Decomposability of Krein space operators,” Integral Equations and Operator Theory, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 419-439, 2016. |
| [101] | M. Gromov, Metric structures for Riemannian and Non-Riemannian spaces, Birkhäuser, 2007. |
| [102] | K. T. Sturm, “On geometry of metric measure spaces,” Acta Mathematica, vol. 196, no. 1, pp. 65-131, 2006. |
| [103] | M. D. Haene, “Thurston Geometries in Dimension 4 from a Riemannian Perspective,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 2014. |
| [104] | W. Jaco, Lectures on Three Manifold Topology, American Mathematical Society, 1980. |
| [105] | A. Hatcher, Notes on Basic 3-Manifold Topology, unpublished notes, 2007. |
| [106] | W. P. Thurston, The geometry and Topology of 3-Manifolds, Princeton University Press, 1997. |
| [107] | R. C. Kirby, The topology of 4-Manifolds, Springer, 1989. |
| [108] | A. Ranicki, Algebraic and Geometric Surgery, Oxford University Press, 2002. |
| [109] | C. T. C. Wall, Surgery on Compact Manifolds, American Mathematical Society, 1999. |
| [110] | A. D. Wallace, “The structure of Topological Semigroups,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 61, pp. 95-112, 1955. |
| [111] | I. Androulidakis and G. Skandalis, “The holonomy groupoid of a singular foliation,” Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, vol. 626, pp. 1-37, 2009. |
| [112] | O. Saeki, “Topology of Singular Fibres of Differentiable Maps,” Japanese Journal of Mathematics, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 269-306, 2003. |
| [113] | R. Montgomery, A tour of Subriemannian geometry, American Mathematical Society, 2002. |
| [114] | P. Fillmore, C. Laurie, and H. Radjavi, “On matrix spaces with zero determinant,” Linear Algebra and its Applications, vol. 436, no. 7, pp. 2188-2200, 2012. |
| [115] | “Linking and Causality in Globally Hyperbolic Spacetimes,” Communications in Mathematical Physics, vol. 346, no. 3, pp. 917-938, 2016. |
| [116] | H. S. Larios and S. G. Burguete, “Arc length associated with generalized distance functions,” Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, vol. 438, no. 2, pp. 752-769, 2016. |
| [117] | N. T. Zung, “Entropy of geometric structures,” Journal of Differential Geometry, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 325-346, 2001. |
| [118] | F. Pediconi, “A local version of Myers-Steenrod Theorem,” Differential Geometry and its Applications, vol. 74, 2021. |
| [119] | F. Pediconi, “A compactness theorem for locally Homogeneous spaces,” Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 139-159, 2021. |
| [120] | “General relativity on Stratified manifolds in BV-BFV Formalism dissertation by Zur Erlangung...” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Zurich, 2019. |
| [121] | L. W. Tu, “Introductory lectures on Equivariant Cohomology,” Annals of Mathematics Studies, vol. 131, Princeton University Press, 2018. |
| [122] | A. Hatcher, Algebraic Topology, Cambridge University Press, 2002. |
| [123] | A. Hatcher, “Spectral sequences,” unpublished notes, 2004. |
| [124] | F. Schuller, “Geometrical Anatomy of Theoretical Physics,” lecture notes, International Winter School on Gravity and Light, 2015. |
APA Style
Singh, S. (2026). Stratification and Related Ideas for Understanding the Smoothness of Black Hole Horizons. American Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 13(1), 45-58. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14
ACS Style
Singh, S. Stratification and Related Ideas for Understanding the Smoothness of Black Hole Horizons. Am. J. Astron. Astrophys. 2026, 13(1), 45-58. doi: 10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14
@article{10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14,
author = {Shreyansh Singh},
title = {Stratification and Related Ideas for Understanding the Smoothness of Black Hole Horizons
},
journal = {American Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics},
volume = {13},
number = {1},
pages = {45-58},
doi = {10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14},
url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14},
eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ajaa.20261301.14},
abstract = {In recent work by the author it was found that there is an absence of diffeomorphism symmetry for black hole horizons constrained by the causal structure of spacetime. This absence puts stringent constraints on the black hole spacetime manifold, topology, and smoothness. In particular, it suggests that such manifolds may have only continuity of data but no differentiability. In mathematics, this is described as a spacetime manifold with a C0 structure, and the assumption of smoothness as a C∞ structure might not hold. Previously, we supposed that the spacetime manifold may have a Finsler structure and might not be a homogeneous manifold, thus requiring new insights to study black hole spacetime. Investigating the spacetime manifold picture, we presume a mathematical concept called stratification of spacetime with smooth gluing of manifold data as an essential criterion for understanding the topology of black hole spacetime. In basic terms, stratification is a way of gluing spacetime into a collection of disjoint regions called strata such that the strata themselves are smooth, but the whole manifold may or may not have a differentiable structure. The topology of the spacetime manifold then depends on the criteria used for the process called stratification of spacetime. We investigate these and relatable ideas further in this paper. For smooth readability, we have referenced relevant literature grouped by topics or subtopics throughout the text.},
year = {2026}
}
TY - JOUR T1 - Stratification and Related Ideas for Understanding the Smoothness of Black Hole Horizons AU - Shreyansh Singh Y1 - 2026/03/18 PY - 2026 N1 - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14 DO - 10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14 T2 - American Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics JF - American Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics JO - American Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics SP - 45 EP - 58 PB - Science Publishing Group SN - 2376-4686 UR - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajaa.20261301.14 AB - In recent work by the author it was found that there is an absence of diffeomorphism symmetry for black hole horizons constrained by the causal structure of spacetime. This absence puts stringent constraints on the black hole spacetime manifold, topology, and smoothness. In particular, it suggests that such manifolds may have only continuity of data but no differentiability. In mathematics, this is described as a spacetime manifold with a C0 structure, and the assumption of smoothness as a C∞ structure might not hold. Previously, we supposed that the spacetime manifold may have a Finsler structure and might not be a homogeneous manifold, thus requiring new insights to study black hole spacetime. Investigating the spacetime manifold picture, we presume a mathematical concept called stratification of spacetime with smooth gluing of manifold data as an essential criterion for understanding the topology of black hole spacetime. In basic terms, stratification is a way of gluing spacetime into a collection of disjoint regions called strata such that the strata themselves are smooth, but the whole manifold may or may not have a differentiable structure. The topology of the spacetime manifold then depends on the criteria used for the process called stratification of spacetime. We investigate these and relatable ideas further in this paper. For smooth readability, we have referenced relevant literature grouped by topics or subtopics throughout the text. VL - 13 IS - 1 ER -