Creep Tide Model for the 3-Body Problem. The rotational evolution of a circumbinary planet

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive tidal model based on creep tide theory for the rotational evolution of bodies in the three-body problem, applied to circumbinary planets, with analytical and numerical results predicting their final spin states.

Contribution

It develops a general differential equation framework for tidal interactions in three-body systems, extending to N bodies, and applies it to circumbinary planets to predict their rotation states.

Findings

Most circumbinary planets are likely in sub-synchronous rotation.

The model accurately reproduces low-eccentricity orbital behaviors.

Cross torques significantly influence tidal evolution and must be included.

Abstract

We present a tidal model for treating the rotational evolution in the general three-body problem with arbitrary viscosities, in which all the masses are considered to be extended and all the tidal interactions between pairs are taken into account. Based on the creep tide theory, we present the set of differential equations that describes the rotational evolution of each body, in a formalism that is easily extensible to the N tidally-interacting body problem. We apply our model to the case of a circumbinary planet and use a Kepler-38 like binary system as a working example. We find that, in this low planetary eccentricity case, the most likely final stationary rotation state is the 1:1 spin-orbit resonance, considering an arbitrary planetary viscosity inside the estimated range for the solar system planets. We derive analytical expressions for the mean rotational stationary state, based on high-order power series of the semimajor axes ratio a1 /a2 and low-order expansions of the eccentricities. These are found to reproduce very accurately the mean behaviour of the low-eccentric numerical integrations for arbitrary planetary relaxation factors, and up to a1/a2 \sim 0.4. Our analytical model is used to predict the stationary rotation of the Kepler circumbinary planets and find that most of them are probably rotating in a sub-synchronous state, although the synchrony shift is much less important than the one estimated in Zoppetti et al. (2019, 2020). We present a comparison of our results with those obtained with the Constant Time Lag and find that, unlike what we assumed in our previous works, the cross torques have a non-negligible net secular contribution, and must be taken into account when computing the tides over each body in an N-extended-body system from an arbitrary reference frame. These torques are naturally taken into account in the creep theory.