Is cosmic censorship restored in higher dimensions?

TL;DR

This paper investigates gravitational collapse in higher-dimensional spacetimes, showing that certain conditions lead to naked singularities in four dimensions but are covered in higher dimensions, thus restoring cosmic censorship.

Contribution

It generalizes previous analyses of Vaidya spacetimes to higher dimensions and identifies conditions under which cosmic censorship is restored in these settings.

Findings

Naked singularities occur in 4D for specific mass functions.

Transition to higher dimensions can cover naked singularities.

Cosmic censorship is restored in higher dimensions for certain initial data.

Abstract

In this paper we extend the analysis of gravitational collapse of generalised Vaidya spacetimes to higher dimensions, in the context of the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture. We present the sufficient conditions on the generalised Vaidya mass function, that will generate a locally naked singular end state. Our analysis here generalises all the earlier works on collapsing higher dimensional generalised Vaidya spacetimes. With specific examples, we show the existence of classes of mass functions that lead to a naked singularity in four dimensions, which gets covered on transition to higher dimensions. Hence for these classes of mass function Cosmic Censorship gets restored in higher dimensions and the transition to higher dimensions restricts the set of initial data that results in a naked singularity.