No abstract

We obtain an expression for the active gravitational mass of a collapsing fluid distribution, which brings out the role of density inhomogeneity and local anisotropy in the fate of spherical collapse.

We analyse the effects of thermal conduction in a relativistic fluid, just after its departure from hydrostatic equilibrium, on a time scale of the order of thermal relaxation time. It is obtained that the resulting evolution will critically depend on a parameter defined in terms of thermodynamic variables, which is constrained by causality requirements

A general procedure to find static and axially symmetric, interior solutions to the Einstein equations is presented. All the so obtained solutions, verify the energy conditions for a wide range of values of the parameters, and match smoothly to some exterior solution of the Weyl family, thereby representing globally regular models describing non spherical sources of gravitational field. In the spherically symmetric limit, all our models converge to the well known incompressible perfect fluid solution.The key stone of our approach is based on an ansatz allowing to define the interior metric in terms of the exterior metric functions evaluated at the boundary source. Some particular sources are obtained, and the physical variables of the energy-momentum tensor are calculated explicitly, as well as the geometry of the source in terms of the relativistic multipole moments. The total mass of different configurations is also calculated, it is shown to be equal to the monopole of the exterior solution.