Global behavior of spherically symmetric Navier–Stokes equations with density-dependent viscosity

In this paper, we study a free boundary problem for compressible spherically symmetric Navier–Stokes equations without a solid core. Under certain assumptions imposed on the initial data, we obtain the global existence and uniqueness of the weak solution, give some uniform bounds (with respect to time) of the solution and show that it converges to a stationary one as time tends to infinity. Moreover, we obtain the stabilization rate estimates of exponential type in L∞-norm and weighted H1-norm of the solution by constructing some Lyapunov functionals. The results show that such system is stable under the small perturbations, and could be applied to the astrophysics.