Adiabatic models of the cosmological radiative era (Q1863093)

This paper deals with a generalisation of the Lemaître-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) solution of general relativity. The LTB solution describes the spherical-symmetric gravitational collapse of a dust cloud (characterised by vanishing pressure). The present authors find a solution to Einstein's equations which extends the LTB solution to an imperfect fluid with anisotropic pressure. A possible physical application is the description of the early Universe between nucleosynthesis and decoupling. The authors show that the state variables of the generalised LTB solution evolve similarly to the adiabatic perturbations on the background of a homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann Universe.