Late-time behavior of stellar collapse and explosions. I. Linearized perturbations.

We study the power-law tails in the evolution of massless fields around a fixed background geometry corresponding to a black hole. We give analytical arguments for their existence at scri+, at the future horizon and at future timelike infinity. We confirm their existence with numerical integrations of the curved spacetime wave equation on the background of a Schwarzschild and a Reissner-Nordström black hole. These results are relevant to studies of mass inflation and the instability of Cauchy horizons. The analytic arguments also suggest the behavior of the full nonlinear dynamics, which we study numerically in a companion paper. Typeset using REVTEX 1