Can we observationally test the weak cosmic censorship conjecture?

Abstract

In general relativity, gravitational collapse of matter fields ends with the formation of a spacetime singularity, where the matter density becomes infinite and standard physics breaks down. According to the weak cosmic censorship conjecture, singularities produced in the gravitational collapse cannot be seen by distant observers and must be hidden within black holes. The validity of this conjecture is still controversial and at present we cannot exclude that naked singularities can be created in our Universe from regular initial data. In this paper, we study the radiation emitted by a collapsing cloud of dust and check whether it is possible to distinguish the birth of a black hole from the one of a naked singularity. In our simple dust model, we find that the properties of the radiation emitted in the two scenarios is qualitatively similar. That suggests that observational tests of the cosmic censorship conjecture may be very difficult, even in principle.

1+19 pages, 4 figures. v2: minor changes

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Cited by in corpus (19)

• Calculating black hole shadows: Review of analytical studies
• Shadows of spherically symmetric black holes and naked singularities
• Can we distinguish black holes from naked singularities by the images of their accretion disks?
• Photon Spheres and Spherical Accretion Image of a Hairy Black Hole
• Shadow of a naked singularity
• Weak cosmic censorship, dyonic Kerr-Newman black holes and Dirac fields
• Photon sphere and shadow of a time-dependent black hole described by a Vaidya metric
• Global visibility of a strong curvature singularity in nonmarginally bound dust collapse
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• Globally visible singularity in an astrophysical setup
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• The gravitational redshift of photons traversing a collapsing dust cloud and observable consequences
• Gravitational blueshift from a collapsing object
• The shadow of a collapsing dark star
• Shadow of higher dimensional collapsing dark star and blackhole
• Cauchy horizon stability in a collapsing spherical dust cloud. II: Energy bounds for test fields and odd-parity gravitational perturbations