Hydrodynamic stability and stellar oscillations

H M ANTIA

Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,

Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai 400 005, India

E-mail: antia@astro.tifr.res.in

Abstract. Chandrasekhar’s monograph on Hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability, published

in 1961, is a standard reference on linear stability theory. It gives a detailed account of stability of

fluid flow in a variety of circumstances, including convection, stability of Couette flow, Rayleigh–

Taylor instability, Kelvin–Helmholtz instability as well as the Jean’s instability for star formation.

In most cases he has extended these studies to include effects of rotation and magnetic field. In a

later paper he has given a variational formulation for equations of non-radial stellar oscillations. This

forms the basis for helioseismic inversion techniques as well as extension to include the effect of

rotation, magnetic field and other large-scale flows using a perturbation treatment.

Keywords. Hydrodynamics; magnetohydrodynamics; helioseismology.

PACS Nos 95.30.Lz; 95.30.Qd; 96.60.Ly