The inertia of heat and its role in the dynamics of dissipative collapse

The decreasing of the inertial mass density, established in the past for dissipative fluids, is found to be produced by the ``inertial'' term of the transport equation. Once the transport equation is coupled to the dynamical equation one finds that the contribution of the inertial term diminishes the effective inertial mass and the ``gravitational'' force term, by the same factor. An intuitive picture, and prospective applications of this result to astrophysical scenarios are discussed.