A Riccati equation in radiative stellar collapse

We model the behavior of a relativistic spherically symmetric shearing fluid undergoing gravitational collapse with heat flux. It is demonstrated that the governing equation for the gravitational behavior is a Riccati equation. We show that the Riccati equation admits two classes of new solutions in closed form. We regain particular models, obtained in previous investigations, as special cases. A significant feature of our solutions is the general spatial dependence in the metric functions which allows for a wider study of the physical features of the model, such as the behavior of the causal temperature in inhomogeneous space-times.