Black universes with trapped ghosts

A black universe is a nonsingular black hole where, beyond the horizon, there is an expanding, asymptotically isotropic universe. Such models have been previously found as solutions of general relativity with a phantomscalar field as a source of gravity and, without phantoms, in a brane world of RS2 type. Here we construct examples of static, spherically symmetric black-universe solutions in general relativity with a minimally coupled scalar field{symbol} whose kinetic energy is negative in a restricted strong-field region of spacetime and positive outside it. Thus in such configurations a "ghost" is trapped in a small part of space, which may in principle explain why no ghosts are observed under usual conditions. © 2011 Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.