Paper detail

On the role of dissipation in structure formation for dilute relativistic gases: the static background case

A correction to the Jeans stability criterion due to heat conduction is established for the case of high temperature gases. This effect is only relevant for relativistic fluids and includes an additional term due to a density gradient driven heat flux. The result is obtained by thoroughly analyzing the exponentially growing modes present in the dynamics of density fluctuations in the linearized relativistic Navier-Stokes regime. The corrections to the corresponding Jeans mass and wavenumber are explicitly obtained and are compared to the non-relativistic and non-dissipative values using the transport coefficients obtained in the BGK approximation.