Secular Instability and the Turning-Point Principle for Rigidly Rotating Viscous Stars

Abstract: We study axisymmetric stability of rigidly rotating viscous stars modeled by the free-boundary Navier--Stokes--Poisson (NSP) system. The unstable index of the linearized NSP generator, counted with Riesz algebraic multiplicity, equals the Morse index of the augmented energy at fixed mass and total angular momentum. We prove an abstract Kelvin--Tait--Chetaev theorem for damped gyroscopic equations with finite negative stiffness index, requiring no compactness assumptions and no spectral gap at zero; the stiffness kernel may be infinite-dimensional. In the NSP application, the viscous dissipation is degenerate: its axisymmetric kernel, generated by rigid axial translation and rigid rotation, is projected out before applying the abstract theorem, while conservation laws and a Routh reduction transfer the resulting instability index back to the full NSP generator. For slowly rotating branches with fixed total angular momentum, viscous instability begins at the continuation of a first nondegenerate spherical mass maximum. By contrast, for every sufficiently small nonzero angular momentum, the corresponding Euler--Poisson star remains axisymmetrically spectrally stable on an interval beyond this maximum. Thus dissipation can destabilize a rotating star before the corresponding inviscid star becomes unstable. This separation of the stability thresholds results from viscous redistribution of angular momentum, which removes the inviscid constraints on its material distribution while preserving its total value.