Can we see naked singularities?

Abstract

We study singularities which can form in a spherically symmetric gravitational collapse of a general matter field obeying weak energy condition. We show that no energy can reach an outside observer from a null naked singularity. That means they will not be a serious threat to the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture (CCC). For the timelike naked singularities, where only the central shell gets singular, the redshift is always finite and they can in principle, carry energy to a faraway observer. Hence for proving or disproving CCC the study of timelike naked singularities will be more important. Our results are very general and are independent of initial data and the form of the matter.