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Rotationally Flattened Isothermal Structures
Hayashi, Narita & Miyama (1982; hereafter HNM82) discovered an analytic solution to the equations that govern the structure of rotationally flattened, self-gravitating isothermal gas clouds. Their solution describes a family of centrally condensed models whose degree of flattening ranges from a spherical structure to an infinitesimally thin disk. For several reasons, I consider this to be one of the most remarkable discoveries — and, hence, one of the most significant papers — related to the structure of self-gravitating systems that was published in the decade of the '80s. First, as has been remarked earlier, there is no particular reason why one should guess ahead of time that the equilibrium properties of any rotating, self-gravitating configuration should be describable in terms of analytic functions. When dealing with compressible equations of state, such analytic solutions are rare even in the context of spherically symmetric structures, so it is impressive that HNM82 found a solution for rotationally flattened, isothermal configurations. Second, about six months earlier the same year, Alar Toomre (1982) published an independent discovery and strikingly independent derivation of exactly the same family of rotationally flattened, isothermal models. Third, these two independent derivations were motivated by a desire to better understand two quite different astrophysical environments: The research of HNM82 was focused on star-forming gas clouds while Toomre's research was focused on the structure of elliptical galaxies and the dark-matter halos around spiral galaxies.
Despite my assertion that HNM82 is one of the most significant papers to be published over the past few decades, citation indexes reveal that it is not widely referenced. In large part I attribute this to the fact that HNM82 was published in a Japanese journal (Progress of Theoretical Physics) that has not yet made its archival articles available to the open-access, Astrophysics Data System.
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