Advances in Mathematics 166, 149–192 (2002) doi:10.1006/aima.2001.2002, available online at http://www.idealibrary.comon The Space of Composants of an Indecomposable Continuum Sławomir Solecki1 Department of Mathematics, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405 E-mail:
[email protected] Communicated by R. Daniel Mauldin Received October 20, 2000; accepted April 20, 2001 The family of all composants of an indecomposable continuum is studied. We investigate the equivalence relation induced on an indecomposable continuum by its partition into composants. We show that up to Borel bireducibility such an equiva- lence relation can be of only two types: E0 and E1 , the E0 type being ‘‘simple’’ and the E1 type being ‘‘complicated.’’ As a consequence of this, we show that each View metadata,indecomposable citation continuumand similar carriespapers a at Borel core.ac.uk probability measure which assigns 0 to brought to you by CORE each composant and 0 or 1 to each Borel set which is the union of a family of provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector composants. In particular, it follows that there is no Borel transversal for the family of all composants. This solves an old problem in the theory of continua. We prove that all hereditarily indecomposable continua are of the complicated type, that is, they fall into the E1 type. We analyze the properties of being of type E1 or of type E0 . We show, using effective descriptive set theory, that the first of these properties is analytic and so the second one is coanalytic. We construct examples of continua of both types; in fact, we produce a family of indecomposable continua and use it to prove that these properties are complete analytic and complete coanalytic, respectively, hence non-Borel, so they do not admit simple topological charac- terizations.