  The brane world description of our universe entails a large extra dimension
and a fundamental scale of gravity that may be lower than the Planck scale by
several orders of magnitude. An interesting consequence of this scenario occurs
in the nature of spherically-symmetric vacuum solutions to the brane
gravitational field equations, which often have properties quite distinct from
the standard black hole solutions of general relativity. In this paper, the
spherically-symmetric collapse on the brane world of four types of null fluid,
governed by the barotropic, polytropic, strange quark "bag" model and Hagedorn
equations of state, is investigated. In each case, we solve the approximate
gravitational field equations, obtained in the high density limit, determine
the equation which governs the formation of apparent horizons and investigate
the conditions for the formation of naked singularities. Though, naively, one
would expect the increased effective energy density on the brane to favor the
formation of black holes over naked singularities, we find that, for the types
of fluid considered, this is not the case. However, the black hole solutions
differ substantially from their general-relativistic counterparts and brane
world corrections often play a role analogous to charge in general relativity.
As a possible astrophysical application of this work, the possibility that
energy emission from a Hagedorn fluid collapsing to form a naked singularity
may be a source of GRBs in the brane world is also considered.
