Prove weak cosmic censorship for generic 4D vacuum gravitational collapse · revision history
Revision 1
Accepted · first revision · record
- Title
- Prove weak cosmic censorship for generic 4D vacuum gravitational collapse
- Plain
- Weak cosmic censorship says that collapsing matter or gravitational waves never produce a singularity visible from far away, except in finely tuned cases. It has been proved only under strong symmetry assumptions.
- Precise
- For generic asymptotically flat initial data for the 3+1 vacuum Einstein equations (or Einstein equations with physically reasonable matter), prove that the maximal globally hyperbolic development has a complete future null infinity. An answer is a proof, or a counterexample that persists under an open set of perturbations of the data.
- Settled by
- A proof of completeness of future null infinity for generic asymptotically flat vacuum data, or a stable counterexample.
- Kind
- well-posed
- Answer type
- proof
- References
- (empty)
- Literature status
- open
- Status note
- Proved for spherically symmetric Einstein-scalar collapse (Christodoulou 1999); non-generic naked singularities exist for vacuum (Rodnianski and Shlapentokh-Rothman 2019); the generic 4D vacuum case is open as of 2026.
- Posed since
- 1969