Oppenheimer-Snyder Collapse in f(R) Gravity : Stalemate or Resolution?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Oppenheimer-Snyder collapse in f(R) gravity, revealing that matching conditions and matter restrictions significantly constrain possible exterior solutions, leaving the collapse problem unresolved within the considered models.

Contribution

It demonstrates that in metric f(R) gravity, the matching conditions impose strong constraints on exterior solutions, affecting the viability of dust collapse scenarios.

Findings

Matching conditions fix boundary data but do not determine the bulk extension.

For certain f(R) models, the exterior solutions are highly constrained and often exclude collapse.

The physically acceptable solutions are limited to specific branches with constant curvature.

Abstract

We study the Oppenheimer--Snyder (OS) collapse problem in metric $f(R)$ gravity by matching a homogeneous dust Friedmann--Lema\^itre--Robertson--Walker (FLRW) interior to a generalized Vaidya exterior across a timelike hypersurface. In metric $f(R)$ gravity, regular matching requires the continuity not only of the induced metric and extrinsic curvature, but also of the Ricci scalar and its normal derivative. These additional conditions generically exclude the usual Ricci-flat exteriors, such as the Schwarzschild solution. We show that, for an unrestricted generalized Vaidya exterior, the matching conditions fix the boundary data but do not uniquely determine the bulk extension, leaving open the possibility of a physical resolution of the collapse problem. However, once the exterior matter content is restricted to the generalized Vaidya form, the field equations impose a strong constraint, forcing $f_{,R}$ to be linear in the areal radius, $f_{,R}=A(v)\,r+B(v)$. For locally invertible $f_{,R}$ with $f_{,RR}\neq 0$, this sharply reduces the admissible class of exteriors, so that the matching data uniquely determine the exterior solution on each interval where the boundary map is locally invertible. We further show that, for generic viable $f(R)$ models, the branch with $A(v)\neq 0$ does not admit a global extension with finite asymptotic curvature, while the branch $A(v)=0$ places the interior on a constant-curvature sector. This excludes nontrivial dust collapse, although it does not rule out collapse for more general interior matter with constant trace. Thus, generalized Vaidya exteriors reopen the collapse problem at a formal level, but within the restricted matter sector considered here, the OS dust collapse problem remains unresolved and the physically acceptable branch is highly constrained.