Seismology of Giant Planets

TL;DR

Seismology of giant planets offers a promising way to uncover their internal structures and compositions, utilizing techniques adapted from helioseismology and new methods like ring seismology, with recent observational advances fueling ongoing research.

Contribution

This paper reviews the potential of seismology to study giant planets, discussing methods, recent results, and future prospects in planetary interior research.

Findings

Detection of Jupiter's acoustic oscillations with SYMPA.

Indirect detection of Saturn's f-modes in its rings.

Development of new ground-based and space instruments for planetary seismology.

Abstract

Seismology applied to giant planets could drastically change our understanding of their deep interiors, as it has happened with the Earth, the Sun, and many main-sequence and evolved stars. The study of giant planets' composition is important for understanding both the mechanisms enabling their formation and the origins of planetary systems, in particular our own. Unfortunately, its determination is complicated by the fact that their interior is thought not to be homogeneous, so that spectroscopic determinations of atmospheric abundances are probably not representative of the planet as a whole. Instead, the determination of their composition and structure must rely on indirect measurements and interior models. Giant planets are mostly fluid and convective, which makes their seismology much closer to that of solar-like stars than that of terrestrial planets. Hence, helioseismology techniques naturally transfer to giant planets. In addition, two alternative methods can be used: photometry of the solar light reflected by planetary atmospheres, and ring seismology in the specific case of Saturn. The current decade has been promising thanks to the detection of Jupiter's acoustic oscillations with the ground-based imaging-spectrometer SYMPA and indirect detection of Saturn's f-modes in its rings by the NASA Cassini orbiter. This has motivated new projects of ground-based and space-borne instruments that are under development. In this chapter, we review the science that seismology could help understand about the four giant planets, the instrumental and modeling approaches, and the most recent observational results.