Ocean Tides on Asynchronously Rotating Planets Orbiting Low-mass Stars

TL;DR

This study simulates ocean tides on planets orbiting low-mass stars, revealing they can be extremely strong and significantly impact planetary surface features and orbital dynamics, especially on eccentric planets.

Contribution

First global ocean tide simulations on asynchronously rotating planets with high eccentricities, showing tides can reach hundreds of meters and greatly influence planetary evolution.

Findings

Ocean tides can reach ~1000 meters in height.

Tidal energy dissipation can be around 100 W/m^2.

Tides can accelerate orbital evolution by 10-100 times.

Abstract

Planets in the liquid-water habitable zone of low-mass stars experience large tidal forces, $10^3$ to $10^4$ times those on Earth, due to the small distance between the habitable zone and the host stars. Therefore, interior solid tides, ocean tides and atmospheric tides on these planets could be much stronger than that on Earth, but rare work has been done to explicitly simulate the ocean tides. Here, for the first time, we perform global ocean tide simulations and show that ocean tides on asynchronously rotating planets with large eccentricities can reach $\mathcal{O}(1000)\,\mathrm{m}$ in height and $\mathcal{O}(10)\,\mathrm{m\,s^{-1}}$ in flow speed. Interactions between tide and bottom topography can induce large energy dissipation, $\sim\mathcal{O}(100)\,\mathrm{W\,m^{-2}}$ in global mean. This tidal energy dissipation can strongly accelerate orbital evolution by 1-2 orders of magnitude. However, for planets with small eccentricities, the ocean tides are much weaker but still comparable to that on modern Earth. Our results suggest that ocean tides on eccentric planets orbiting low-mass stars are orders of magnitude more powerful than those on Earth and can dramatically influence surface geography and orbital evolution.