ON THE STABILITY OF TENSION STARS

False vacuum material has been invoked to drive an inflationary phase in the very early Universe, which leads us to believe that relics of the false vacuum may exist today. It was recently suggested that stars composed of such material, encased in a shell of ordinary matter, may have survived to the present era. We examine the mechanical stability of the proposed solutions of Einstein's field equations, and show that stable equilibrium configurations consistent with the dominant energy condition are only possible for certain values of the parameters.