This paper is concerned with the three dimensional compressible Euler–Poisson equations with moving physical vacuum boundary condition. This fluid system is usually used to describe the motion of a self-gravitating inviscid gaseous star. The local existence of classical solutions for initial data in certain weighted Sobolev spaces is established in the case that the adiabatic index satisfies 46ac" title="Click to view the MathML source">1<γ<3.