Gravitational collapse and the formation of black holes for the spherically symmetric Einstein-Vlasov system.

Journal article, 2010

We review results on the spherically symmetric, asymptotically flat Einstein-Vlasov system. We focus on a recent result where we found explicit conditions on the initial data which guarantee the formation of a black hole in the evolution. Among these data there are data such that the corresponding solutions exist globally in Schwarzschild coordinates. We put these results into a more general context, and we include arguments which show that the spacetimes we obtain satisfy the weak cosmic censorship conjecture and contain a black hole in the sense of suitable mathematical definitions of these concepts which are available in the literature.