r-Stable Hypersurfaces in Conformally Stationary Spacetimes

In this paper we study the r-stability of closed spacelike hypersurfaces with constant $r$-th mean curvature in conformally stationary spacetimes of constant sectional curvature. In this setting, we obtain a characterization of $r-$stability through the analysis of the first eigenvalue of an operator naturally attached to the $r$-th mean curvature. As an application, we treat the case in which the spacetime is the de Sitter space.