A turning point principle for liquid Lane-Emden stars

Abstract

Upon fixing the adiabatic index, the spherically symmetric liquid Lane-Emden stars governed by the Euler-Poisson system with a "stiffened gas" equation of state $p=ρ^γ-1$ form a one-parameter family, naturally parametrised by the central density $κ=\barρ_κ(0)\in(1,\infty)$. In contrast to the gaseous case, the liquid free boundary breaks the self-similarity of the family and bends the mass-radius curve, creating extrema of the mass when $γ<2(d-1)/d$. We formulate a turning point principle in the spirit of Zel'dovich, Wheeler and Thorne, and of its rigorous relativistic counterpart from the works of Hadžić, Lin and Rein: the number of radial growing modes equals the negative Morse index of the linearised operator, is locally constant along the family, and can change only at the turning points of the mass-radius curve, the bending orientation there dictating whether a growing mode is gained or lost. We describe the large central density limit in which the gaseous tail (read off from a planar dynamical system) determines whether the mass-radius curve spirals, and hence whether the number of growing modes remains bounded or tends to infinity. As corollaries we recover and sharpen the known radial (in)stability results for liquid Lane-Emden stars and, in combination with existing non-radial analysis, obtain a turning point criterion for non-radial stability.