A gravitating Yang-Mills instanton

We present an asymptotically flat, spherically symmetric, static, globally regular and horizonless solution of SU(2)-gauged N = 1, d = 5 supergravity. The SU(2) gauge field is that of the BPST instanton. We argue that this solution, analogous to the global monopoles found in d = 4 N = 2 and N = 4 gauged supergravities, describes the field of a single string-theory object which does not contribute to the entropy of black holes when we add it to them and show that it is, indeed, the dimensional reduction on T-5 of the gauge 5-brane. We investigate how the energy of the solution is concentrated as a function of the instanton's scale showing that it never violates the hoop conjecture although the curvature grows unboundedly in the zero scale limit.