On the backward stability of the Schwarzschild black hole singularity

We study the backwards-in-time stability of the Schwarzschild singularity from a dynamical PDE point of view. More precisely, considering a spacelike hypersurface $\Sigma_0$ in the interior of the black hole region, tangent to the singular hypersurface $\{r=0\}$ at a single sphere, we study the problem of perturbing the Schwarzschild data on $\Sigma_0$ and solving the Einstein vacuum equations backwards in time. We obtain a local well-posedness result for small perturbations lying in certain weighted Sobolev spaces. No symmetry assumptions are imposed. The perturbed spacetimes all have a singularity at a "collapsed" sphere on $\Sigma_0$, where the leading asymptotics of the curvature and the metric match those of their Schwarzschild counterparts to a suitably high order. As in the Schwarzschild backward evolution, the pinched initial hypersurface $\Sigma_0$ `opens up' instantly, becoming a smooth spacelike (cylindrical) hypersurface. This result thus yields classes of examples of non-symmetric vacuum spacetimes, evolving forward-in-time from smooth initial data, which form a Schwarzschild type singularity at a collapsed sphere. We rely on a precise asymptotic analysis of the Schwarzschild geometry near the singularity which turns out to be at the threshold that our energy methods can handle.