  While it is widely believed that the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently
large mass will lead to a density singularity and an event horizon, we propose
that this never happens when quantum effects are taken into account. In
particular, we propose that when the conditions become ripe for a trapped
surface to form, a quantum critical surface sweeps over the collapsing body,
transforming the nucleons in the collapsing matter into a lepton/photon gas
together with a positive vacuum energy. This will happen regardless of the
matter density at the time a trapped surface starts to form, and as a result we
predict that at least in all cases of gravitational collapse involving ordinary
matter, a large fraction of the rest mass of the collapsing matter will be
converted into a burst of neutrinos, and {\gamma}-rays. We predict that the
peak luminosity of these bursts is only weakly dependent on the mass of the
collapsing object, and is on the order of ({\epsilon}_q/m_Pc^2)^1/4c^5/G, where
{\epsilon}_q is the mean energy of a nucleon parton and m_P is the Planck mass.
The duration of the bursts will depend the mass of the collapsing objects; in
the case of stellar core collapse we predict that the duration of both the
neutrino and {\gamma}-ray bursts will be on the order of 10 seconds.
