Newtonian and General Relativistic Models of Spherical Shells

Abstract

A family of spherical shells with varying thickness is derived by using a simple Newtonian potential-density pair. Then, a particular isotropic form of a metric in spherical coordinates is used to construct a General Relativistic version of the Newtonian family of shells. The matter of these relativistic shells presents equal azimuthal and polar pressures, while the radial pressure is a constant times the tangential pressure. We also make a first study of stability of both the Newtonian and relativistic families of shells.