Tidally Heated Terrestrial Exoplanets: Viscoelastic Response Models

TL;DR

This paper models the viscoelastic response of tidally heated terrestrial exoplanets, revealing how different rheologies influence internal heating and implications for planetary habitability.

Contribution

It introduces new viscoelastic models (SAS and Burgers) for tidal heating, showing their impact on thermal evolution and habitable zone boundaries.

Findings

Tidal heating exceeds radionuclide heating below 10-30 days orbital period.

Extreme tidal heating can cause global partial melting.

Tidal heating generally reduces habitable zone width.

Abstract

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, 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.