Gravitation without black holes.

It is shown by explicit derivation that if a nonrotating body carries a scalar charge, then the static spherically symmetric space-time around it remains completely singularity-free even when approaching the limiting case of a pointlike object. The total energy of the matter and scalar fields has a null value at the exterior of the body because the mixed component of the Ricci tensor equals zero at each point. The causal properties of space-time remain unchanged, and the line element shows that the region of space-time from which signals cannot escape to the exterior or are infinitely red-shifted is reduced to the point where the radius is zero. As the radius goes to zero the Schwarzschild sphere is reduced by the presence of an arbitrarily small scalar charge to a geometrical point, preventing the formation of a black hole. Applying isotropic coordinates, the theoretical result is shown to be beyond the reach of actual experimental techniques.