wiki:SelfGravityDevel

Version 21 (modified by Baowei Liu, 13 years ago) ( diff )

Self Gravity

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Physics

Poisson Equation of Self Gravity

The electric field generated by a point charge is

On the other hand, the gravitational acceleration by a point mass of is


The Poisson equation for electrostatic potential is

Analytically we can get the Poisson equation for the gravity

where is the mass density. This equation describes how the potential is determined by the mass density distribution.

For example, consider the uniform density distribution

Use spherical coordinates, the Poisson equation for the density distribution Equation (1) can be written as

Or

Solving Equation (3) with the density Equation (2), we obtain the solution for the potential for the uniform density sphere:

Free-fall Time

The free-fall time is the characteristic time that would take a body to collapse under its own gravitational attraction, if no other forces existed to oppose the collapse. Using the Gauss's theorem, the gravitional acceleration is given by

where is the mass inside

So the equation of motion for a gas molecule under a control of the self-gravity can be written as

Equation (7) can be written as the form of the conservation of mechanical energy

Suppose the gas molecule is initially located at . So the total energy

Now consider gas collapse. So . Equation (8) gives

Let

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