Naked singularities in a self-similar Tolman-Bondi spacetime

Abstract

Following Lake and Zannias we show that naked strong curvature singularities develop in Tolman-Bondi inhomogeneous spherically symmetric spacetimes for all the three cases of a bound, unbound and marginally bound gravitational collapse. It is observed that the assumption of self-similarity rather than the spherical symmetry is crucial in determining the nature of the singularity in any gravitationally collapsing configuration.