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Due to the highly degeneracy and singularities of the entropy equation, the physical entropy for viscous and heat conductive polytropic gases behave singularly in the presence of vacuum and it is thus a challenge to study its dynamics. It is shown in this paper that the uniform boundedness of the entropy and the inhomogeneous Sobolev regularities of the velocity and temperature can be propagated for viscous and heat conductive gases in $\mathbb R^3$, provided that the initial vacuum occurs only at far fields with suitably slow decay of the initial density. Precisely, it is proved that for any strong solution to the Cauchy problem of the heat conductive compressible Navier--Stokes equations, the corresponding entropy keeps uniformly bounded and the $L^2$ regularities of the velocity and temperature can be propagated, up to the existing time of the solution, as long as the initial density vanishes only at far fields with a rate no more than $O(\frac{1}{|x|^2})$. The main tools are some singularly weighted energy estimates and an elaborate De Giorgi type iteration technique. The De Giorgi type iterations are carried out to different equations in establishing the lower and upper bounds of the entropy.

This paper concerns the physical behaviors of any solutions to the one dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes equations for viscous and heat conductive gases with constant viscosities and heat conductivity for fast decaying density at far fields only. First, it is shown that the specific entropy becomes not uniformly bounded immediately after the initial time, as long as the initial density decays to vacuum at the far field at the rate not slower than $O\left(\frac1{|x|^{\ell_\rho}}\right)$ with $\ell_\rho>2$. Furthermore, for faster decaying initial density, i.e., $\ell_\rho\geq4$, a sharper result is discovered that the absolute temperature becomes uniformly positive at each positive time, no matter whether it is uniformly positive or not initially, and consequently the corresponding entropy behaves as $O(-\log(\varrho_0(x)))$ at each positive time, independent of the boundedness of the initial entropy. Such phenomena are in sharp contrast to the case with slowly decaying initial density of the rate no faster than $O(\frac1{x^2})$, for which our previous works \cite{LIXINADV,LIXINCPAM,LIXIN3DK} show that the uniform boundedness of the entropy can be propagated for all positive time and thus the temperature decays to zero at the far field. These give a complete answer to the problem concerning the propagation of uniform boundedness of the entropy for the heat conductive ideal gases and, in particular, show that the algebraic decay rate $2$ of the initial density at the far field is sharp for the uniform boundedness of the entropy. The tools to prove our main results are based on some scaling transforms, including the Kelvin transform, and a Hopf type lemma for a class of degenerate equations with possible unbounded coefficients.