Gravitational Collapse

Abstract

In the standard picture of gravitational collapse to a black hole, a key role is played by the hypothesis of cosmic censorship – according to which no naked space-time singularities can result from any collapse. A precise definition of a naked singularity is given here which leads to a strong ‘local’ version of the cosmic censorship hypothesis. This is equivalent to the proposition that a Cauchy hypersurface exits for the space-time. The principle that the surface area of a black hole can never decrease with time is presented in a new and simplified form which generalizes the earlier statements. A discussion of the relevance of recent work to the naked singularity problem is also given.