Some comments on the nature of initial data in spherical collapse

Abstract

Various authors have shown the occurence of naked singularities and black holes in the spherical gravitational collapse of inhomogeneous dust. In a recent preprint, Antia has criticised a statement in a paper by Jhingan, Joshi and Singh on dust collapse. We show that his criticism is invalid. Antia shows that in Eulerian coordinates a series expansion for the density of a collapsing Newtonian fluid can have only even powers. However, he has overlooked the fact that Jhingan et al. have actually used Lagrangian (comoving) coordinates, and not Eulerian coordinates. As we show, in Lagrangian coordinates there is no restriction that the density have only even powers and hence his criticism is invalid. We also point out that an earlier claim by Antia on the instability of strong naked singularities in dust collapse is not supported by any concrete analysis, and is hence incorrect.