Critical Shear in Stellar Collapse: The Asymmetry Required to Defeat a Torsion Bounce

A density bound halts spherical collapse, but real stellar cores are not spherical, and shear contributes to the expansion equation with the opposite effect. This paper computes the critical shear at which that halt would fail, on three carrier branches, and compares it with the shear a collapsing core can plausibly carry. On the neutron branch the critical shear is 8.559e+32 per second, and on the electron branch 4.655e+29 per second. A core collapsing at 3e17 kg per cubic metre has a characteristic gravitational rate of 4.475e+03 per second, so reaching the neutron-branch critical shear would require an asymmetry factor of 1.91e+29, vastly beyond unity, while a one-percent asymmetry gives a shear of only 4.475e+01 per second. Shear in stellar collapse therefore cannot defeat a torsion bounce; if collapse is halted at the bound at all, it is halted for realistic asymmetries too. Computed, not measured.