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Abstract

Marginally trapped surfaces (MTSs) are commonly used in numerical relativity to locate black holes. For dynamical black holes, it is not known generally if this procedure is sufficiently reliable. Even for Schwarzschild black holes, Wald and Iyer constructed foliations which come arbitrarily close to the singularity but do not contain any MTSs. In this paper, we review the Wald-Iyer construction, discuss some implications for numerical relativity, and generalize to the well known Vaidya spacetime describing spherically symmetric collapse of null dust. In the Vaidya spacetime, we numerically locate non-spherically symmetric trapped surfaces which extend outside the standard spherically symmetric trapping horizon. This shows that MTSs are common in this spacetime and that the event horizon is the most likely candidate for the boundary of the trapped region.