On nonlinear asymptotic stability of the Lane–Emden solutions for the viscous gaseous star problem

This paper proves the nonlinear asymptotic stability of the Lane–Emden solutions for spherically symmetric motions of viscous gaseous stars if the adiabatic constant γ lies in the stability range ( 4 / 3 , 2 ) . It is shown that for small perturbations of a Lane–Emden solution with same mass, there exists a unique global (in time) strong solution to the vacuum free boundary problem of the compressible Navier–Stokes–Poisson system with spherical symmetry for viscous stars, and the solution captures the precise physical behavior that the sound speed is C 1 / 2 -Holder continuous across the vacuum boundary provided that γ lies in ( 4 / 3 , 2 ) . The key is to establish the global-in-time regularity uniformly up to the vacuum boundary, which ensures the large time asymptotic uniform convergence of the evolving vacuum boundary, density and velocity to those of the Lane–Emden solution with detailed convergence rates, and detailed large time behaviors of solutions near the vacuum boundary. In particular, it is shown that every spherical surface moving with the fluid converges to the sphere enclosing the same mass inside the domain of the Lane–Emden solution with a uniform convergence rate and the large time asymptotic states for the vacuum free boundary problem (1.1.2a) , (1.1.2b) , (1.1.2c) , (1.1.2d) , (1.1.2e) , (1.1.2f) are determined by the initial mass distribution and the total mass. To overcome the difficulty caused by the degeneracy and singular behavior near the vacuum free boundary and coordinates singularity at the symmetry center, the main ingredients of the analysis consist of combinations of some new weighted nonlinear functionals (involving both lower-order and higher-order derivatives) and space–time weighted energy estimates. The constructions of these weighted nonlinear functionals and space–time weights depend crucially on the structures of the Lane–Emden solution, the balance of pressure and gravitation, and the dissipation. Finally, the uniform boundedness of the acceleration of the vacuum boundary is also proved.