Motivated by a problem arising in astrophysics we study a
nonlinear elliptic equation in $\mathbb{R}^{N}$ with cylindrical symmetry
and with singularities on a whole subspace of $\mathbb{R}^{N}$. We study
the problem in a variational framework and, as the nonlinearity
also displays a critical behavior, we use some suitable version of
the Concentration-Compactness Principle. We obtain several
results on existence and nonexistence of solutions.