Past horizons in Robinson-Trautman spacetimes with a cosmological constant (0911.5317v1)

Abstract: We study past horizons in the class of type II Robinson-Trautman vacuum spacetimes with a cosmological constant. These exact radiative solutions of Einstein's equations exist in the future of any sufficiently smooth initial data, and they approach the corresponding spherically symmetric Schwarzschild-(anti-)de Sitter metric. By analytic methods we investigate the existence, uniqueness, location and character of the past horizons in these spacetimes. In particular, we generalize the Penrose-Tod equation for marginally trapped surfaces, which form such white-hole horizons, to the case of a nonvanishing cosmological constant, we analyze behavior of its solutions and visualize their evolutions. We also prove that these horizons are explicit examples of an outer trapping horizon and a dynamical horizon, so that they are spacelike past outer horizons.