Gravitational field induced by spherically symmetric distributions of electrically ccounterpoised dust

Spherically symmetric distributions of electrically counterpoised dust(ECD) are used to construct solutions to Einstein-Maxwell equations in Majumdar-Papapetrou formalism. Unexpected bifurcating behavior of regular and singular solutions with regard to source strength is found for localized, as well as for the delta-function ECD distributions. Unified treatment of general ECD distributions is accomplished and it is shown that for certain source strengths one class of regular solutions approaches Minkowski spacetime, while the other comes arbitrarily close to black hole solutions.