Higher Modes of Non-Radial Oscillations of Stars by Variational Methods

Abstract

The Ritz method is applied to a variational principle of Chandrasekhar to determine the normal modes of non-radial oscillation of a massive star. Although good results are obtained for the f-mode and the p-modes, it is shown that the method may fail to detect the g-modes. The effect of the choice of coordinate functions is considered.