2 research outputs found
Reissner-Nordstrom and charged gas spheres
The main point of this paper is a suggestion about the proper treatment of
the photon gas in a theory of stellar structure and other plasmas. This problem
arises in the study of polytropic gas spheres, where we have already introduced
some innovations. The main idea, already advanced in the contextof neutral,
homogeneous, polytropic stellar models, is to base the theory firmly on a
variational principle. Another essential novelty is to let mass distribution
extend to infinity, the boundary between bulk and atmosphere being defined by
an abrupt change in the polytropic index, triggered by the density. The logical
next step in this program is to include the effect of radiation, which is a
very significant complication since a full treatment would have to include an
account of ionization, thus fieldsrepresenting electrons, ions, photons,
gravitons and neutral atoms as well. In way of preparation, we consider models
that are charged but homogeneous, involving only gravity, electromagnetism and
a single scalar field that represents both the mass and the electric charge; in
short, anon-neutral plasma. While this work only represents a stage in the
development of a theory of stars, without direct application to physical
systems, it does shed some light on the meaning of the Reissner-Nordstrom
solution of the modified Einstein-Maxwell equations., with an application to a
simple system.Comment: 19 pages, plain te
Ideal Stars and General Relativity
We study a system of differential equations that governs the distribution of
matter in the theory of General Relativity. The new element in this paper is
the use of a dynamical action principle that includes all the degrees of
freedom, matter as well as metric. The matter lagrangian defines a relativistic
version of non-viscous, isentropic hydrodynamics. The matter fields are a
scalar density and a velocity potential; the conventional, four-vector velocity
field is replaced by the gradient of the potential and its scale is fixed by
one of the eulerian equations of motion, an innovation that significantly
affects the imposition of boundary conditions. If the density is integrable at
infinity, then the metric approaches the Schwarzschild metric at large
distances. There are stars without boundary and with finite total mass; the
metric shows rapid variation in the neighbourhood of the Schwarzschild radius
and there is a very small core where a singularity indicates that the gas laws
break down. For stars with boundary there emerges a new, critical relation
between the radius and the gravitational mass, a consequence of the stronger
boundary conditions. Tentative applications are suggested, to certain Red
Giants, and to neutron stars, but the investigation reported here was limited
to polytropic equations of state. Comparison with the results of Oppenheimer
and Volkoff on neutron cores shows a close agreement of numerical results.
However, in the model the boundary of the star is fixed uniquely by the
required matching of the interior metric to the external Schwarzschild metric,
which is not the case in the traditional approach.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figure