Spin and Orbital Dynamics Of Planets Undergoing Thermal Atmospheric Tides Using A Vectorial Approach

Earth-mass planets are expected to have atmospheres and experience thermal tides raised by the host star.

These tides transfer energy to the planet that can counter the dissipation from bodily tides. Indeed, even a relatively thin atmosphere can drive the rotation of these planets away from the synchronous state.

Here we revisit the dynamical evolution of planets undergoing thermal atmospheric tides. We use a novel approach based on a vectorial formalism, which is frame independent and valid for any configuration of the system, including any eccentricity and obliquity values.

We provide the secular equations of motion after averaging over the mean anomaly and the argument of the pericenter, which are suitable to model the long-term spin and orbital evolution of the planet.

Ema F. S. Valente, Alexandre C. M. Correia

Comments: 15 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2306.03449
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:2312.06672 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2312.06672v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Journal reference: Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 679, A153 (2023)
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202245443
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Submission history
From: Alexandre Correia
[v1] Thu, 7 Dec 2023 11:15:34 UTC (237 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06672

astrobiology