INHOMOGENEOUS DUST COLLAPSE WITH COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT

Abstract

We investigate the occurrence of naked singularities in the gravitational collapse of an inhomogeneous dust cloud in an expanding de Sitter background — a piece of Tolman–Bondi–de Sitter space–time. It turns out that the collapse proceed in the same way as in the Minkowski background, i.e., the strong curvature naked singularities form and thus violate the cosmic censorship conjecture. Our result unambiguously support the fact that the asymptotic flatness of space–time is not a necessary ingredient for the development of naked singularities.