The instability of naked singularities in the gravitational collapse of a scalar field

Abstract

One of the fundamental unanswered questions in the general theory of relativity is whether ``naked'' singularities, that is singular events which are visible from infinity, may form with positive probability in the process of gravitational collapse. The conjecture that the answer to this question is in the negative has been called ``cosmic censorship.'' The present paper, which is a continuation previous work, addresses this question in the context of the spherical gravitational collapse of a scalar field.Comment: 35 pages, published version, abstract added in migratio