H BookTiledMenu

Tiled Menu

[Preamble by Joel E. Tohline — Circa 2020]  In an effort to serve ongoing research activities of the astrophysics community, this media-wiki-based hypertext book (H_Book) reviews what is presently understood about the structure, stability, and dynamical evolution of (Newtonian) self-gravitating fluids. In the context of this review, the "dynamical evolution" categorization generally will refer to studies that begin with an equilibrium configuration that has been identified — via a stability analysis — as being dynamically (or, perhaps, secularly) unstable then, using numerical hydrodynamic technique, follow the development to nonlinear amplitude of deformations that spontaneously develop as a result of the identified instability.

As is reflected in our choice of the overarching set of Principle Governing Equations, our focus is on studies of compressible fluid systems — those that obey a barotropic equation of state. But, in addition, chapters are included that review what is known about the structure and stability of self-gravitating incompressible (uniform-density) fluid systems because: (a) in this special case, the set of governing relations is often amenable to a closed-form, analytic solution; and (b) most modern computationally assisted studies of compressible fluid systems — both in terms of their design and in the manner in which results have been interpreted — have been heavily influenced by these, more classical, studies of incompressible fluid systems.

As the layout of the following tiled menu reflects, this review is broken into three major topical areas based primarily on geometrical considerations:

• Studies of configurations that are — at least initially — spherically symmetric.
• Two-dimensional configurations — such as rotationally flattened spheroidal-like or toroidal-like structures; or infinitesimally thin, but nonaxisymmetric, disk-like structures.
• Configurations that require a full three-dimensional treatment — most notably, "spinning" ellipsoidal-like structures; or binary systems.

This is very much a living review. The chosen theme encompasses an enormous field of research that, because of its relevance to the astrophysics community, over time is continuing to expand at a healthy pace. As a consequence the review is incomplete now, and it will always be incomplete, so please bear with me. On any given day/week/month I will turn my attention to a topic that seems particularly interesting to me and I will begin writing a new chapter or I will edit/expand the contents of an existing tiled_menu chapter. This necessarily means that all chapters are incomplete while, in practice, some are much more polished than others. Hopefully steady forward progress is being made and the review will indeed be viewed as providing a service to the community.

Context

Global Energy Considerations

Principal Governing Equations (PGEs)		Continuity		Euler		1st Law of Thermodynamics		Poisson

 

Equation of State (EOS)		Ideal Gas		Total Pressure   Bond, Arnett, & Carr (1984)