Gravitational collapse of matter fields in de Sitter spacetimes

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the spherically symmetric gravitational collapse of matter fields in the de Sitter universe. The energy-momentum tensor of the matter field is assumed to admit a wide variety including dust, perfect fluids with equations of state, fluids with tangential and radial pressure, and with bulk and shear viscosity. Under different initial conditions imposed on the velocity and the density profiles, and by combining the results from exact analytical methods with those obtained from numerical techniques, we track the formation and evolution of spherical marginally trapped spheres as the matter suffers continual gravitational collapse. We show that the quasilocal formalism of trapped surfaces provides an ideal framework to study the evolution of horizons. More precisely, black hole and cosmological horizons may be viewed as the time development of marginally trapped surfaces.