The Structure of Singularity in Gravitational Collapse

We investigate the end state of the gravitational collapse of an inhomogeneous dust cloud in higher dimensional space-time. The naked singularities are shown to be developing as the final outcome of non-marginally bound collapse. The naked singularities are found to be gravitationally strong in the sense of Tipler .

We construct spacetimes which provide spherical and nonspherical models of black hole formation in the flat Friedmann--Lemaitre--Robertson--Walker (FLRW) universe with the Lemaitre--Tolman--Bondi solution and the Szekeres quasispherical solution, respectively. These dust solutions may contain both shell-crossing and shell-focusing naked singularities. These singularities can be physically regarded as the breakdown of dust description, where strong pressure gradient force play...

There are non-radial null geodesics emanating from the shell focusing singularity formed at the symmetric center in a spherically symmetric dust collapse. In this article, assuming the self-similarity in the region filled with the dust fluid, we study these singular null geodesics in detail. We see the time evolution of the angular diameter of the central naked singularity and show that it might be bounded above by the value corresponding to the circular null geodesic in the ...

An outstanding problem in gravitation theory and relativistic astrophysics today is to understand the final outcome of an endless gravitational collapse. Such a continual collapse would take place when stars more massive than few times the mass of the sun collapse under their own gravity on exhausting their nuclear fuel. According to the general theory of relativity, this results either in a black hole, or a naked singularity- which can communicate with faraway observers in t...

Gravitational collapse is one of the most striking phenomena in gravitational physics. The cosmic censorship conjecture has provided strong motivation for researches in this field. In the absence of general proof for the censorship, many examples have been proposed, in which naked singularity is the outcome of gravitational collapse. Recent development has revealed that there are examples of naked singularity formation in the collapse of physically reasonable matter fields, a...

We bring out here the role of initial data in causing the black hole and naked singularity phases as the final end state of a continual gravitational collapse. The collapse of a type I general matter field is considered, which includes most of the known physical forms of matter. It is shown that given the distribution of the density and pressure profiles at the initial surface from which the collapse evolves, there is a freedom in choosing rest of the free functions, such as ...

Using the general formalism for spherical gravitational collapse developed in [1], we investigate here the final fate of a spherical distribution of a matter cloud, where radial pressures vanish but tangential pressures are non-zero. Within this framework, firstly we examine the effect of introducing a generic small pressure in a well-known black hole formation process, which is that of an otherwise pressure-free dust cloud. The intriguing result we find is that a dust collap...

Considering gravitational collapse of Type I matter fields, we prove that, given an arbitrary $C^{2}$- mass function $\textit{M}(r,v)$ and a $C^{1}$- function $h(r,v)$ (through the corresponding $C^{1}$- metric function $\nu(t,r)$), there exist infinitely many choices of energy distribution function $b(r)$ such that the `true' initial data ($\textit{M},h(r,v)$) leads the collapse to the formation of naked singularity. We further prove that the occurrence of such a naked singu...

Generalizing the results of Joshi and Dwivedi in Commun.Math.Phys. 146, p.333 (1992), it is pointed out that strong curvature naked singularities could occur in the self-similar gravitational collapse of any form of matter satisfying the weak energy condition for the positivity of mass-energy density.

We consider here the question if it is possible to recover cosmic censorship when a transition is made to higher dimensional spacetimes, by studying the spherically symmetric dust collapse in an arbitrary higher spacetime dimension. It is pointed out that if only black holes are to result as end state of a continual gravitational collapse, several conditions must be imposed on the collapsing configuration, some of which may appear to be restrictive, and we need to study caref...