TITLE: Black Holes, Naked Singularities, and Cosmic Censorship

SPEAKER: Dr. K. Shwetketu Virbhadra,

TIME: Thursday Mar. 21, 2001 at 4 PM

PLACE: George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)

Penrose stated that "... it might be the case that cosmic censorship requires a zero (or at least a nonpositive) cosmological constant". However, recent studies of Type Ia supernovae indicate a positive cosmological constant. In view of this we investigated theoretically the distinctive observational features of naked singularities and black holes and interesting results have emerged. We used gravitational lensing to address this problem.