Nonspherical perturbations of critical collapse and cosmic censorship

Abstract

Choptuik has demonstrated that naked singularities can arise in gravitational collapse from smooth, asymptotically flat initial data, and that such data have codimension one in spherical symmetry. Here we show, for perfect fluid matter with equation of state $p=\rho/3$, by perturbing around spherical symmetry, that such data have in fact codimension one in the full phase space, at least in a neighborhood of spherically symmetric data.