1999/01/01 by Demetrios Christodoulou · 7 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics
paper · doi:10.2307/121023
openalex publication_date 1999/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
One of the fundamental unanswered questions in the general theory of relativity is whether \naked singularities, that is singular events which are visible from inflnity, may form with positive probability in the process of gravitational collapse. The conjecture that the answer to this question is in the negative has been called \cosmic censorship. The present paper, which is a continuation of the work in [1], [2], [3] and [4] addresses this question in the context of the spherical gravitational collapse of a scalar fleld. The problem of a spherically symmetric self-gravitating scalar fleld is formulated in terms of a 2-dimensional quotient space-time manifold Q with boundary (see [1]). The boundary ofQ corresponds to the set of flxed points of the group action, the center of symmetry, which is a timelike geodesic i. The manifoldQ is endowed with a Lorentzian metric gab, an area radius function i‚ @ i‚ @ @r