Abstract

The belief still persists, at least for an important part of the community, that in general relativity the cosmological constant Λ must remain immaculate. However, Bianchi identities show that Λ could acquire local properties in the presence of matter, i.e., Λ→Λ(xμ). In this paper we go even further, and we show that a non-uniform vacuum energy does not even require coexistence with any additional form of matter-energy, nor of any theory beyond general relativity, at least for extreme environments, such as the proximity of a black hole.