Naked singularities formation in the gravitational collapse of barotropic spherical fluids (Q1878362)

The article analyzes the gravitational collapse of spherical, barotropic perfect fluids without any further simplifying assumption. It is proven that naked singularities occur for solutions such that the mass function is analytic in a neighborhood of the spacetime singularity. In order to prove that, the authors rewrite the system of field equations in a suitable coordinate system (area-radius coordinates), which makes it possible to reduce this system to a single, quasi-linear, second order partial differential equation. Thus the metric can be written in full generality in terms of one unknown function. Therefore it is possible to analyze the behavior of the radial null geodesics near the singular point. This enables to construct sub-solutions, which admit analytic mass functions around the singularity. However it is unclear if the corresponding set of initial data is of measure zero or not.