Consequences of semidiurnal thermal tides on hot Jupiters zonal mean flows [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1811.09214


Hot Jupiters are submitted to an intense stellar heating. The resulting thermal tides can torque their atmospheres into asynchronous rotation, while these planets are usually assumed to be locked into spin-orbit synchronization with their host star. Particularly, the thermal atmospheric torque can be greatly enhanced by the dynamical component of the tidal response, that is the component associated with the propagation of internal waves. Owing to the involved complex dynamics, semi-analytical approaches are crucial to understand the physical mechanisms that are responsible for the frequency-resonant behavior of thermal tides, and quantify the atmospheric tidal torque. In this work, we revisit the early works by Arras \& Socrates (2010) and present an improved modeling of thermal tides taking into account rotation and radiative cooling. Using this new modeling, we compute analytically the atmospheric tidal response of hot Jupiters and show that resonances associated with low-frequency internal gravity waves are able to drive asynchronous zonal flows in the range 1-30 days.

Read this paper on arXiv…

P. Auclair-Desrotour and J. Leconte
Mon, 26 Nov 18
71/100

Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures, proceedings of the SF2A annual meeting