User:Tohline/Apps/RotatingWhiteDwarfs

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Rotationally Flattened White Dwarfs

Example Equilibrium Configurations

Uniform Rotation

 Structures have been determined for axially symmetric [uniformly] rotating gas masses, in the polytropic and white-dwarf cases … Physical parameters for the rotating configurations were obtained for values of n < 3, and for a range of white-dwarf configurations. The existence of forms of bifurcation of the axially symmetric series of equilibrium forms was also investigated. The white-dwarf series proved to lack such points of bifurcation, but they were found on the polytropic series for n < 0.808.

Differential Rotation

 … work by Roxburgh (1965, Z. Astrophys., 62, 134), Anand (1965, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S., 54, 23), and James (1964, ApJ, 140, 552) shows that the [Chandrasekhar (1931, ApJ, 74, 81)] mass limit $~M_3$ is increased by only a few percent when uniform rotation is included in the models, … In this Letter we demonstrate that white-dwarf models with masses considerably greater than $~M_3$ are possible if differential rotation is allowed … models are based on the physical assumption of an axially symmetric, completely degenerate, self-gravitating fluid, in which the effects of viscosity, magnetic fields, meridional circulation, and relativistic terms in the hydrodynamical equations have been neglected.