The study of spherically symmetric motion is important for the theory of explosion waves. In this paper, we consider a ‘spherical piston’ problem for the relativistic Euler equations, which describes the wave motion produced by a sphere expanding into an infinite surrounding medium. We use the reflected characteristics method to construct a global piecewise smooth solution with a single shock of this spherical piston problem, provided that the speed of the sphere is a small perturbation of a constant speed.
