A uniform-density perfect-gas sphere supported by decreasing pressure has buoyancy frequency squared in the interior. Its specific entropy decreases outward and adiabatic displacements are buoyantly unstable. For the nonradial polynomial family, the product of the two normalized squared mode frequencies is , displaying one growing branch even when radial compression modes are stable.
For an ideal gas with constant adiabatic index , let and be specific heat capacities and . The ideal gas law and the internal energy of an ideal gas give and specific internal energy . Since , the internal energy per unit volume is . Consequently a star with spherical symmetry has
The radial integral requires the volume measure : the first printed expression omits this factor if its differential is read literally as . The mass-coordinate expression confirms the required volume interpretation.
Define the enclosed mass , total mass and dimensionless shell label . Mass conservation gives , so the change of variables gives
Here labels a fixed material shell rather than its radial position. In a mass-preserving stellar homology, with . Both a shell's radius and thickness gain a factor , so its volume gains and its mass density becomes . An adiabatic process keeps fixed separately in each shell, even if that constant differs between shells. Thus and . Integration at fixed mass labels proves
The spherical shell theorem gives the Newtonian gravitational potential energy by assembling shells against the mass already inside them:
Every radius gains the same factor , while and remain fixed. Hence
This is the homologous adiabatic stellar stability test. The derivative with respect to the physical stellar radius is . Stationarity at therefore requires , or
After imposing this equilibrium relation, and
Since , a strict energy minimum under this homologous displacement requires
For , contraction sends to , expansion sends it to from below, and is the unique minimum, with . For , contraction sends to , expansion sends it to from above, and is the unique maximum. When , the equilibrium relation makes for every : the scale direction is marginal, not strictly stable. The plotted curves display these three possibilities. This checks homologous radial stability; stability against every stellar displacement needs a fuller perturbation analysis.
Figure 1.
Stellar energy under homologous adiabatic expansion: stable minimum, unstable maximum and marginal scaling
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