Tidal dissipation due to the elliptical instability and turbulent viscosity in convection zones in rotating giant planets and stars

TL;DR

This study investigates how elliptical instability and turbulent convection contribute to tidal dissipation in rotating giant planets and stars, using simulations and scaling laws to quantify their effects.

Contribution

It provides new scaling laws for turbulent viscosity in convection zones and assesses the relative importance of elliptical instability and convection in tidal dissipation.

Findings

Elliptical instability scales with $psilon^3$ in dissipation.

Convective motions act as an effective viscosity scaling with $psilon^2$.

Effective viscosity decreases with tidal frequency as $requency^{-2}$.

Abstract

Tidal dissipation in star-planet systems can occur through various mechanisms, among which is the elliptical instability. This acts on elliptically deformed equilibrium tidal flows in rotating fluid planets and stars, and excites inertial waves in convective regions if the dimensionless tidal amplitude ($\epsilon$) is sufficiently large. We study its interaction with turbulent convection, and attempt to constrain the contributions of both elliptical instability and convection to tidal dissipation. For this, we perform an extensive suite of Cartesian hydrodynamical simulations of rotating Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard convection in a small patch of a planet. We find that tidal dissipation resulting from the elliptical instability, when it operates, is consistent with $\epsilon^3$, as in prior simulations without convection. Convective motions also act as an effective viscosity on large-scale tidal flows, resulting in continuous tidal dissipation (scaling as $\epsilon^2$). We derive scaling laws for the effective viscosity using (rotating) mixing-length theory, and find that they predict the turbulent quantities found in our simulations very well. In addition, we examine the reduction of the effective viscosity for fast tides, which we observe to scale with tidal frequency ($\omega$) as $\omega^{-2}$. We evaluate our scaling laws using interior models of Hot Jupiters computed with MESA. We conclude that rotation reduces convective length scales, velocities and effective viscosities (though not in the fast tides regime). We estimate that elliptical instability is efficient for the shortest-period Hot Jupiters, and that effective viscosity of turbulent convection is negligible in giant planets compared with inertial waves.