Interaction between fast tides and convection with application to giant planets and solar type stars
Interaction between fast tides and convection with application to giant planets and solar type stars
- Event time: 1:00pm until 2:00pm
- Event date: 24th February 2023
- Speaker: Caroline Terquem (Oxford)
- Location: Higgs Centre Seminar Room, Room 4305, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) (James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB)) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
Stars are often found in close binary systems, and gaseous giant planets in the solar system are surrounded by moons. Tides are raised in the bodies in these systems, and their dissipation plays a major role in shaping the orbits. The dissipation rate is very well constrained by observations. For the last 55 years, theory has failed to account for the amount of dissipation in bodies in which there is a substantial convective envelope, as in giant planets and solar type stars. In this talk, we review this theory and show that it is actually not valid when the tides are fast (i.e when the tidal period is short compared to the convective turnover timescale). We propose a new formalism that applies in this regime. Assuming that energy is always transferred from the tides to the convective flow, this formalism yields values for the tidal dissipation factor of Jupiter and Saturn, for the circularization periods of solar-type binaries and for that of extrasolar planets in good overall agreement with observations.
Speaker will be in the Higgs Centre in person.
Event resources
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The Higgs Centre Colloquia are a fortnightly series of talks aimed at a wide-range of topical Theoretical Physics issues..