Initial data and spherical dust collapse

Abstract

By considering families of radial null geodesics, we study the subsets of initial data that lead to naked singularities and black holes in inhomogeneous spherical dust collapse. We introduce the notion of central homogeneity for spherical dust collapse and prove that for the occurrence of naked singularities, the initial data set must in general be centrally homogeneous. Even though mathematically this indicates that naked singularities are in general unstable, we show that centrally inhomogeneous perturbations in the initial data are not physically reasonable. This provides an example of the fact that instability in this context deduced with respect to general perturbations can become stabilised once the class of perturbations are restricted to be physical.