The Rotation of a Gravitating Sphere in a Monatomic Gas,II

The purpose of this work is to study the fluid motion caused by the high speed rotation of a gravitating sphere in a monatomic gas. It has been possible to find a stable steady solution only for very small Prandtl number, which can be interpreted to mean an optically thick gas. The flow is characterized by a flat radial jet in the equatorial plane and a viscous boundary layer on the spherical surface which, in some cases, lies beneath a thermal boundary layer. That the outer region must be hydrostatic puts very stringent constraints on the associated velocity field which necessitate still another boundary layer on the sphere. This last layer is shown to be unstable to small disturbances in certain temperature ranges. Finally, a similar solution that exists for order one Prandtl number must be disregarded because this last boundary layer is always unstable.