building on work by hans lindblad, daniel coutand and steve shkoller, we prove that the equations of motion of an incompressible, inviscid, self-gravitating fluid with free boundary are well-posed. the methodology consists of the use of a smoothing operator which smoothes along the boundary of the fluid. this then allows the use of a fixed-point-type argument, which provides a solution to a smoothed version of the problem. estimates subsequently show that these solutions converge to a solution of the full problem.