TIDALLY HEATED TERRESTRIAL EXOPLANETS: VISCOELASTIC RESPONSE MODELS

By W. Henning, R. O’Connell, D. Sasselov. 2009

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tidal friction in exoplanet systems, driven by orbits that allow for durable nonzero eccentricities at short heliocentric periods, can generate internal heating far in excess of the conditions observed in our own solar system. Secular perturbations or a notional 2:1 resonance between a hot Earth and hot Jupiter can be used as a baseline to consider the thermal evolution of convecting bodies subject to strong viscoelastic tidal heating. We compare results first from simple models using a fixed Quality factor and Love number, and then for three different viscoelastic rheologies: the Maxwell body, the Standard Anelastic Solid (SAS), and the Burgers body. The SAS and Burgers models are shown to alter the potential for extreme tidal heating by introducing the possibility of new equilibria and multiple response peaks. We find that tidal heating tends to exceed radionuclide heating at periods below 10–30 days, and exceed insolation only below 1–2 days. Extreme cases produce enough tidal heat to initiate global-scale partial melting, and an analysis of tidal limiting mechanisms such as advective cooling for earthlike planets is discussed. To explore long-term behaviors, we map equilibria points between convective heat loss and tidal heat input as functions of eccentricity. For the periods and magnitudes discussed, we show that tidal heating, if significant, is generally detrimental to the width of habitable zones.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb93a6c23909f32e80f89318cc542070d514a652

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Citations in the corpus

• Tidal locking of habitable exoplanets (2017, background): “These effects can be significant, perhaps even dominant, and recently some researchers have improved on ET models by including more realistic assumptions about planetary and stellar interiors, e.g., (Henning et al. 2009; Correia 2006; Ferraz-Mello 2013; Zahnle et al. 2015; Driscoll and Barnes 2015).”
• How to Characterize Habitable Worlds and Signs of Life (2017, background): “…of hypothetical satellites and moons up to Earth-mass orbiting EGPs (e.g., Barnes et al. 2002, Dvorak et al. 2010) as well as discussion on a potential influence of tidal heating on such moons (e.g., reviewed in Henning et al. 2009, Henning & Hurford 2014, Chen et al. 2014, Heller et al. 2014).”
• Tidal heating in icy satellite oceans (2014, background): “E.M.A. Chen, F. Nimmo ⇑, G.A. Glatzmaier Dept. Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Received 14 May 2013 Revised 21 October 2013 Accepted 22 October 2013 Available online 30”
• THE MASS OF Kepler-93b AND THE COMPOSITION OF TERRESTRIAL PLANETS (2014, methodology): “We assumed Q = 100 based on the tidal quality factors estimated for terrestrial planets in the Solar System (Yoder 1995; Henning et al. 2009).”
• Tidal obliquity evolution of potentially habitable planets (2011, background): “Previous studies (Barnes et al. 2008; Jackson et al. 2008; Barnes et al. 2009, 2010a; Henning et al. 2009) investigated the impact of tidal heating and orbital evolution on the habitability of exoplanets but not the effect of tilt erosion.”