In a recent important breakthrough D. Christodoulou has solved a long standing problem of General Relativity of evolutionary formation of trapped surfaces in the Einstein-vacuum space-times. He has identified an open set of regular initial conditions on an outgoing null hypersurface (both finite and at past null infinity) leading to a formation a trapped surface in the corresponding vacuum space-time to the future of the initial outgoing hypersurface and another incoming null hypersurface with the prescribed Minkowskian data. In this paper we give a simpler proof for a finite problem by enlarging the admissible set of initial conditions and, consistent with this, relaxing the corresponding propagation estimates just enough that a trapped surface still forms. We also reduce the number of derivatives needed in the argument from two derivatives of the curvature to just one. More importantly, the proof, which can be easily localized with respect to angular sectors, has the potential for further developments.

The nonlinear asymptotic stability of Lane-Emden solutions is proved in this paper for spherically symmetric motions of viscous gaseous stars with the density dependent shear and bulk viscosities which vanish at the vacuum, when the adiabatic exponent γ lies in the stability regime (4/3, 2), by establishing the global-in-time regularity uniformly up to the vacuum boundary for the vacuum free boundary problem of the compressible Navier-Stokes-Poisson systems with spherical symmetry, which ensures the global existence of strong solutions capturing the precise physical behavior that the sound speed is C1/2-Hölder continuous across the vacuum boundary, the large time asymptotic uniform convergence of the evolving vacuum boundary, density and velocity to those of Lane-Emden solutions with detailed convergence rates, and the detailed large time behavior of solutions near the vacuum boundary. Those uniform convergence are of fundamental importance in the study of vacuum free boundary problems which are missing in the previous results for global weak solutions. Moreover, the results obtained in this paper apply to much broader cases of viscosities than those in Fang and Zhang (Arch Ration Mech Anal 191:195–243, 2009) for the theory of weak solutions when the adiabatic exponent γ lies in the most physically relevant range. Finally, this paper extends the previous local-in-time theory for strong solutions to a global-in-time one.

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In this paper, we provide rigorous justification of the hydrostatic approximation and the derivation of primitive equations as the small aspect ratio limit of the incompressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations in the anisotropic horizontal viscosity regime. Setting $\varepsilon >0$ to be the small aspect ratio of the vertical to the horizontal scales of the domain, we investigate the case when the horizontal and vertical viscosities in the incompressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations are of orders $O(1)$ and $O(\varepsilon^\alpha)$, respectively, with $\alpha>2$, for which the limiting system is the primitive equations with only horizontal viscosity as $\varepsilon$ tends to zero. In particular we show that for ``well prepared" initial data the solutions of the scaled incompressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations converge strongly, in any finite interval of time, to the corresponding solutions of the anisotropic primitive equations with only horizontal viscosities, as $\varepsilon$ tends to zero, and that the convergence rate is of order $O\left(\varepsilon^\frac\beta2\right)$, where $\beta=\min\{\alpha-2,2\}$. Note that this result is different from the case $\alpha=2$ studied in [Li, J.; Titi, E.S.: \emph{The primitive equations as the small aspect ratio limit of the Navier-Stokes equations: Rigorous justification of the hydrostatic approximation}, J. Math. Pures Appl., \textbf{124} \rm(2019), 30--58], where the limiting system is the primitive equations with full viscosities and the convergence is globally in time and its rate of order $O\left(\varepsilon\right)$.

Adapting the convex integration technique introduced in \cite{dLSz5} and subsequently developed in \cite{IsettVicol,IsettOh16,Buckmaster2013transporting}, we construct H\"{o}lder continuous weak solutions to the three dimensional Prandtl system and some other models with vertical viscosity.