The surface signature of the tidal dissipation of the core in a two-layer planet

TL;DR

This paper refines models of tidal dissipation in giant planets' cores, showing how the presence of a fluid envelope influences effective dissipation and improving agreement with observations.

Contribution

It provides an improved expression for the effective tidal quality factor Qp that accounts for the fluid envelope's impact, enhancing model accuracy for giant planets.

Findings

Effective tidal dissipation can increase by up to 2.4 times for Jupiter-like planets.

The new model better matches observed tidal dissipation data.

Range of compatible rheologies is expanded with the new formulation.

Abstract

Tidal dissipation, which is directly linked to internal structure, is one of the key physical mechanisms that drive systems evolution and govern their architecture. A robust evaluation of its amplitude is thus needed to predict evolution time for spins and orbits and their final states. The purpose of this paper is to refine recent model of the anelastic tidal dissipation in the central dense region of giant planets, commonly assumed to retain a large amount of heavy elements, which constitute an important source of dissipation. The previous paper evaluated the impact of the presence of the static fluid envelope on the tidal deformation of the core and on the associated anelastic tidal dissipation, through the tidal quality factor Qc. We examine here its impact on the corresponding effective anelastic tidal dissipation, through the effective tidal quality factor Qp. We show that the strength of this mechanism mainly depends on mass concentration. In the case of Jupiter- and Saturn-like planets, it can increase their effective tidal dissipation by, around, a factor 2.4 and 2 respectively. In particular, the range of the rheologies compatible with the observations is enlarged compared to the results issued from previous formulations. We derive here an improved expression of the tidal effective factor Qp in terms of the tidal dissipation factor of the core Qc, without assuming the commonly used assumptions. When applied to giant planets, the formulation obtained here allows a better match between the an elastic core's tidal dissipation of a two-layer model and the observations.