Spherically symmetric gravitational collapse of a dust cloud in third order Lovelock Gravity

Abstract

We investigate the spherically symmetric gravitational collapse of an incoherent dust cloud by considering a LTB type space-time in third order Lovelock Gravity without cosmological constant, and give three families of LTB-like solutions which separately corresponding to hyperbolic, parabolic and elliptic. Notice that the contribution of high order curvature corrections have a profound influence on the nature of the singularity, and the global structure of space-time changes drastically from the analogous general relativistic case. Interestingly, the presence of high order Lovelock terms leads to the formation of massive, naked and time-like singularities in the 7D space-time, which is disallowed in general relativity. Moveover, we point out that the naked singularities in the 7D case may be gravitational weak therefore may not be a serious threat to the cosmic censorship hypothesis, while the naked singularities in the $D\geq8$ inhomogeneous collapse violate the cosmic censorship hypothesis seriously.