The different faces of a phantom

The SNe type Ia data admit that the universe today may be dominated by some exotic matter with negative pressure violating all energy conditions. Such exotic matter is called phantom matter due to the anomalies connected with violation of the energy conditions. If a phantom matter dominates the matter content of the universe, it can develop a singularity in a finite future proper time. Here we show that, under certain conditions, the evolution of perturbations of this matter may lead to avoidance of this future singularity (the big rip). At the same time, we show that local concentrations of a phantom field may form, among other regular configurations, black holes with asymptotically flat static regions, separated by an event horizon from an expanding, singularity-free, asymptotically de Sitter universe. © 2007 IOP Publishing Ltd.