Shooting Stars in Simple Drawings of $K_{m,n}$

Abstract

Simple drawings are drawings of graphs in which two edges have at most one common point (either a common endpoint, or a proper crossing). It has been an open question whether every simple drawing of a complete bipartite graph $K_{m,n}$ contains a plane spanning tree as a subdrawing. We answer this question to the positive by showing that for every simple drawing of $K_{m,n}$ and for every vertex $v$ in that drawing, the drawing contains a shooting star rooted at $v$, that is, a plane spanning tree containing all edges incident to $v$.