The article says:
The team's calculations show that the vacuum energy inside the shell has a powerful anti-gravity effect, just like the dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Chapline has dubbed the objects produced this way "dark energy stars".Presumably (I'm operating with very little info) this anti-gravity effect would prevent the singularity which is supposed to be at the center of black holes. Otherwise, they'd be similar objects, except for the subtle effects at the horizon, which might be observable.Though this anti-gravity effect might be expected to blow the star's shell apart, calculations by Francisco Lobo of the University of Lisbon in Portugal have shown that stable dark energy stars can exist for a number of different models of vacuum energy. What's more, these stable stars would have shells that lie near the region where a black hole's event horizon would form ...
I took a glance earlier today at Chapline's "Dark Energy Star" paper and I found nothing in it to suggest that he thought the vacuum energy was causally responsible for the absence of a singularity. But I could've missed it, or he just might not have said it, PH.