  In 2014, in a famous paper Hawking strongly criticized the firewall paradox
by claiming that it violates the equivalence principle and breaks the CPT
invariance of quantum gravity. He proposed that the final result of the
gravitational collapse should not be an event horizon, but an apparent horizon
instead. On the other hand, Hawking did not give a mechanism for how this could
work. In the same year, Vaz endorsed Hawking's proposal in a quantum
gravitational model of dust collapse by winning the Second Prize in the 2014
Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competition. He indeed showed that continued
collapse to a singularity can only be obtained if one combines two independent
and entire solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Vaz's interpretation of
the paradox was in terms of simply forbidding such a combination. This leads
naturally to matter condensing on the apparent horizon during quantum collapse.
In that way, an entirely new framework for black holes (BHs) has emerged. The
approach of Vaz was also consistent with Einstein's idea in 1939 of the
localization of the collapsing particles within a thin spherical shell. In this
work we derive the BH mass and energy spectra via a Schrodinger-like approach,
by further supporting Vaz's conclusions that instead of a spacetime singularity
covered by an event horizon, the final result of the gravitational collapse is
an essentially quantum object, an extremely compact "dark star". This
"gravitational atom" is held up not by any degeneracy pressure but by quantum
gravity in the same way that ordinary atoms are sustained by quantum mechanics.
Finally, by evoking the generalized uncertainty principle, the maximum value of
the density of Vaz's shell will be estimated.
