Anisotropic tidal dissipation in misaligned planetary systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new formalism to account for anisotropic effects in tidal dissipation, revealing that traditional isotropic assumptions can lead to significant errors in modeling planetary system evolution, especially with misaligned spins.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel angular momentum-based formalism to accurately compute tidal energy and momentum transfer in anisotropic, non-isotropic fluid bodies, extending beyond isotropic models.

Findings

Isotropic assumption can cause significant errors in tidal dissipation estimates.

Anisotropy affects resonance behavior and energy dissipation scaling.

Application to Earth-Moon system shows potential for improved planetary evolution models.

Abstract

Tides are the main driving force behind the long-term evolution of planetary systems. The associated energy dissipation and momentum exchanges are commonly described by Love numbers, which relate the exciting potential to the tidally perturbed potential. These transfer functions are generally assumed to depend solely on tidal frequency and body rheology, following the isotropic assumption, which presumes invariance of properties by rotation about the centre of mass. We examine the limitations of the isotropic assumption for fluid bodies, where Coriolis acceleration breaks spherical symmetry, resulting in rotational scattering and complex tidal responses. Using angular momentum theory, we derive a new formalism to calculate the tidal rates of energy and momentum transfers in non-isotropic cases. We apply this formalism to the Earth-Moon system to assess the effects of anisotropy in planet-satellite systems with misaligned spin and orbital angular momenta. Our findings indicate that the isotropic assumption can introduce significant errors in planetary evolution models, particularly in the dynamical tide regime. These errors stem from forced wave resonances, with inaccuracies in energy dissipation scaling in proportion to resonance amplification factors.