Brouwer Award Lecture: Anelastic tides of close-in satellites and exoplanets
Abstract
This lecture reviews a new theory of the anelastic tides of celestial bodies in which the deformation of the body is the result of a Newtonian creep inversely proportional to the viscosity of the body and, along each radius, directly proportional to the distance from the actual surface of the body to the equilibrium. The first version of the theory (AAS/DDA 2012; CeMDA 2013), was restricted to homogeneous bodies. It was applied to many different bodies as the Moon, Mercury, super-Earths and hot Jupiters. An improved version (AAS/DDA 2014) included also the loss of angular momentum due to stellar winds and was applied to the study of the rotational evolution of active stars hosting massive companions. One more recent version (Folonier et al. AAS/DDA 2013; DPS 2015) allowed for the consideration of layered structures and was applied to Titan and Mercury. The resulting anelastic tides depend on the nature of the considered body. In the case of low-viscosity bodies (high relaxation factor), as gaseous planets and stars, the results are nearly the same of Darwin's theory. For instance, in these cases the dissipation grows proportionally to the tidal frequency. In the case of high-viscosity rocky satellites and planets (low relaxation factor), the results are structurally different: the dissipation varies with the tidal frequency following an inverse power law and the rotation may be driven to several attractors whose frequencies are 1/2, 1, 3/2, 2, 5/2,… times the orbital mean-motion, even when no permanent triaxiality exists.
- Publication:
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AAS/Division of Dynamical Astronomy Meeting #47
- Pub Date:
- May 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016DDA....4710201F