Does the fluid-static equilibrium of a self-gravitating isothermal sphere of van der Waals' gas present multiple solutions?

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether a self-gravitating isothermal van der Waals' gas sphere exhibits multiple equilibrium solutions, extending previous perfect-gas models and employing a more efficient numerical scheme to analyze solution multiplicity and stability.

Contribution

It introduces a new first-order differential equation scheme using Milne's invariants, enabling detailed analysis of solution multiplicity in van der Waals' gas spheres, building upon and generalizing perfect-gas results.

Findings

Multiple solutions do not occur for the van der Waals' model under studied conditions.

The gravitational number is not limited by an upper bound.

Peripheral density does not spiral, and central density does not oscillate for any characteristic parameters.

Abstract

We take up the investigation we left in the future-work stack in Giordano \textit{et al.} [``Fluid statics of a self-gravitational isothermal sphere of van der Waals' gas,'' Phys. Fluids \textbf{36}, 056127 (2024)], in which we pointed out the obvious necessity to inquire about the existence or absence of values of the characteristic numbers \itm{\alphay} and \itm{\betay} in correspondence to which the perfect-gas model's self gravitational effects, namely, upper boundedness of the gravitational number, spiraling behavior of peripheral density, oscillating behavior of central density, and the existence of multiple solutions corresponding to the same value of the gravitational number, appear also for the van der Waals' model. The development of our investigation brings to the conversion of our M$_{2}$ scheme based on a second-order differential equation into an equivalent system of two first-order differential equations that incorporates Milne's homology invariant variables. The converted scheme \fomt\ turns out to be much more efficacious than the M$_{2}$ scheme in terms of numerical calculations' easiness and richness of results. We use the perfect-gas model as benchmark to test the \fomt\ scheme; we re-derive familiar results and put them in a more general and rational perspective that paves the way to deal with the van der Waals' gas model. We introduce variable transformations that turn out to be the key to study (almost) analytically the monotonicity of the peripheral density with respect to variations of the gravitational number. The study brings to the proof that the gravitational number is not constrained by upper boundedness, the peripheral density does not spiral, and the central density does not oscillate for any couple of values assumed by the characteristic numbers $\alpha$ and $\beta$; however, multiple solutions ...