Code of conduct

Upload instructions

What is exoplanet-talks.org?

News

The fluid dynamical mechanisms responsible for tidal dissipation in giant planets and stars remain poorly understood. One key mechanism is the interaction between tidal flows and turbulent convection. This is thought to act as an effective viscosity in damping the equilibrium tide, but the efficiency of this mechanism is still a matter of much debate.

Using hydrodynamical simulations we investigate the dissipation of the equilibrium tide as a result of its interaction with convection. We model the large-scale tidal flow as an oscillatory background shear flow inside a small patch of convection zone. We simulate Rayleigh-Bénard convection in this Cartesian model and explore how the effective viscosity of the turbulence depends on the tidal (shear) frequency. 

We will present the results from our simulations to determine the effective viscosity, and its dependence on the tidal frequency. The main results are: a new scaling law for the frequency dependence of the effective viscosity which has not previously been observed in simulations or predicted by theory and occurs for frequencies smaller than those in the fast tides regime; negative effective viscosities, which can be thought of as tidal anti-dissipation (or inverse tides), are possible in this system.

The influence of convection on tidal flows