On the gravitational collapse of a cold rotating gas cloud

Extract

In the course of researches on the formation of galaxies one meets the following idealized problem. What is the form of the collapse under gravitational forces of a uniformly rotating spheroidal gas cloud? In the special case where initially the gas is absolutely cold and of uniform density within the spheroid, we show that the collapse proceeds through a series of uniform, uniformly rotating spheroids until a disk is formed. This demonstration is followed by some remarks and conjectures as to what will happen in the physical case when the initial temperature is not necessarily zero.