Trapped surfaces and spherical closed cosmologies

Abstract

This Article (peer-reviewed) gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the formation of trapped surfaces in spherically symmetric initial data defined on a closed manifold. Such trapped surfaces surround a region in which there occurs an enhancement of matter over the average. The conditions are posed directly in terms of physical variables and show that what one needs is a relatively large amount of excess matter confined to a small volume. The expansion of the Universe and an outward flow of matter oppose the formation of trapped surfaces; an inward flow of matter helps. The model can be regarded as a Friedmann-Lemaitre-Walker cosmology with localized spherical inhomogeneities. We show that the total excess mass cannot be too large.