Szekeres models: a covariant approach

Abstract

We exploit the 1 + 1 + 2 formalism to covariantly describe the inhomogeneous and anisotropic Szekeres models. It is shown that an average scale length can be defined covariantly which satisfies a 2d equation of motion driven from the effective gravitational mass (EGM) contained in the dust cloud. The contributions to the EGM are encoded to the energy density of the dust fluid and the free gravitational field Eab. We show that the quasi-symmetric property of the Szekeres models is justified through the existence of 3 independent intrinsic Killing vector fields (IKVFs). In addition the notions of the apparent and absolute apparent horizons are briefly discussed and we give an alternative gauge-invariant form to define them in terms of the kinematical variables of the spacelike congruences. We argue that the proposed program can be used in order to express Sachs’ optical equations in a covariant form and analyze the confrontation of a spatially inhomogeneous irrotational overdense fluid model with the observational data.