On the Motion of a Self-Gravitating Incompressible Fluid with Free Boundary and Constant Vorticity: An Appendix

Abstract

In a recent work [1] the authors studied the dynamics of the interface separating a vacuum from an inviscid incompressible fluid, subject to the self-gravitational force and neglecting surface tension, in two space dimensions. The fluid is additionally assumed to be irrotational, and we proved that for data which are size $ε$ perturbations of an equilibrium state, the lifespan $T$ of solutions satisfies $T \gtrsim ε^{-2}$. The key to the proof is to find a nonlinear transformation of the unknown function and a coordinate change, such that the equation for the new unknown in the new coordinate system has no quadratic nonlinear terms. For the related irrotational gravity water wave equation with constant gravity the analogous transformation was carried out by the last author in [3]. While our approach is inspired by the last author's work [3], the self-gravity in the present problem is a new nonlinearity which needs separate investigation. Upon completing [1] we learned of the work of Ifrim and Tataru [2] where the gravity water wave equation with constant gravity and constant vorticity is studied and a similar estimate on the lifespan of the solution is obtained. In this short note we demonstrate that our transformations in [1] can be easily modified to allow for nonzero constant vorticity, and a similar energy method as in [1] gives an estimate $T\gtrsimε^{-2}$ for the lifespan $T$ of solutions with data which are size $ε$ perturbations of the equilibrium. In particular, the effect of the constant vorticity is an extra linear term with constant coefficient in the transformed equation, which can be further transformed away by a bounded linear transformation. This note serves as an appendix to the aforementioned work of the authors.