Gravitational collapse of generalised Vaidya spacetime

Abstract

We study the gravitational collapse of a generalised Vaidya spacetime in the context of the Cosmic Censorship hypothesis. We develop a general mathematical framework to study the conditions on the mass function so that future directed non-spacelike geodesics can terminate at the singularity in the past. Thus our result generalises earlier works on gravitational collapse of the combinations of Type-I and Type-II matter fields. Our analysis shows transparently that there exist classes of generalised Vaidya mass functions for which the collapse terminates with a locally naked central singularity. We calculate the strength of the these singularities to show that they are strong curvature singularities and there can be no extension of spacetime through them.