Solutions of the Lane-Emden Equation

Raghav Govind Jha & Soumen Roy

May 13, 2013
1 An Eective Stellar Model
Polytropes are a good way to provide simple solutions and estimates of various stellar parameters. They
are much simpler to use and implement numerically than the full stellar equations. It assumes a power
law relation between pressure and density which should be valid throughout the star.
For a polytrope one assumes that gas pressure varies as P = K

which inturn means P = K

n+1
n
,
where is the adiabatic index, n is the polytropic index and K is a constant.
We assume that the star is hydrostatic equilibrium. The two stellar equations are as follows :
dP
dr
=
GM
r
r
2
(1)
dM
r
dr
= 4r
2
(2)
The above equations when combined together gives,
1
r
2
d
dr

r
2

dP
dr

= 4G (3)
with P = K
n+1
n
and, =
c
D
n
, r = .
is the length constant given by,
=

K(n + 1)
4G

1n
n
c
1
2
(4)
Combining it all, we have the following
1

2
d
d

2
dD
n
d

= D
n
n
(5)
This is the Lane-Emden equation for convective polytropic stars.
1
Short Primer : Lane-Emden Equation 2
The above equation can be written in form of unit coecients for the second derivative term as,
d
2
D
n
d
2
+
2

dD
n
d
= D
n
n
(6)
Also, we have two boundary conditions
1
at the center i.e at = 0
dD
n
d
= 0 (7)
D
n
= 1 (8)
For only n = 0, 1, 5, we can solve this equation analytically. In this letter, we will will resort to the
possible numerical simulations for n = 0 to 10 . We also note that for n 5, the star is physically not
possible since the radius diverges and there are issues with the binding energy of the formation of the
nuclear reactions taking place in the sun. Whereas, the n = 0 actually corresponds to incompressible
uid since desnity is always constant. This solution can also be taken as a rough estimate of the internal
structure of earth. The most intersting cases are for n = 1.5 and n = 3 and these correspond to the
cases where = 5/3 (non-relativistic) and = 4/3 (relativistic) respectively.
2 Numerical Solutions of the Lane-Emden Equation
The program to solve the equation for dierent values of n = 0 to n = 10 was written in Matlab
using the ode45 inbuilt operation which employs the fourth & fth order Runge-Kutta method. The
details are included in the Appendix at the end.
The plot of D
n
and was obtained for dierent n and is shown in the Fig(1) below :
3 Appendix
f uncti on [ Dzeta ] = po l y t r o pe ( zet a , D)
Dzeta = zeros ( 2 , 1 ) ;
Dzeta ( 1) = D( 2 ) ;
Dzeta ( 2) = (2/ z e t a )D( 2) D( 1) n ; % Change n a c c o r d i n g l y
f uncti on [ Dzeta ] = f i l e w r i t e ( zet a , D)
[ zet a , D] = ode45( @pol yt r ope , zet a , D)
f i d = fopen ( p o l y t r o pe ( n ) . dat , w ) ; % Change n as per you r e qui r e me nt
d1 = D( : , 1 ) ;
f or i = 1: l ength ( z e t a )
f pr i nt f ( f i d , %f \ t , z e t a ( i ) , d1 ( i ) ) ;
f pr i nt f ( f i d , \n ) ;
end
1
Though, they are both at the centre, can be strictly called as initial conditions at the time of formation of the star
Short Primer : Lane-Emden Equation 3
Figure 1: Solutions to the Lane-Emden Equation
f cl os e ( f i d )
% You have t o change t he i nde x a c c o r d i n g l y .
References
[1] S. Chandrasekhar, An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure, 1939.
[2] Rudra Pratap, Getting Started with Matlab, Oxford University Press