A team of scientists from the University of Arizona, Delft University of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology's Lunar and Planetary Institute has developed a new method to calculate how tides affect the interiors of the solar system's planets and moons. Importantly, they investigated the effects of internal tides on objects that do not have perfectly spherical internal structures.
Europa's surface stands out in this newly reprocessed color view. Image scale is 1.6 km per pixel. North of Europe is on the right. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute.
Celestial tides refer to the deformations that celestial bodies experience when they interact with other bodies due to gravity.
Consider how Jupiter's powerful gravity pulls on its icy moon Europa.
Because Europa's orbit is not circular, the overwhelming gravitational pressure on Jupiter's moons changes as it moves along Jupiter's orbit.
When Europa is closest to Jupiter, the planet's gravity is most felt.
The energy of this deformation heats Europa's interior, allowing an ocean of liquid water to exist beneath the moon's icy surface.
“The same is true for Saturn's moon Enceladus,” says Dr. Alexander Byrne, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology.
“Enceladus has an ice shell that is expected to have much more aspherical symmetry than Europa.”
The body tides experienced by celestial bodies influence how the world evolves over time and, in cases like Europa and Enceladus, its potential habitability for life as we know it. may give.
“The tidal response of spherically symmetric objects has the same wavelength as the tidal forces. Lateral inhomogeneities generate additional tidal responses with spectra that depend on the spatial pattern of such fluctuations.” the researchers said.
“For Mercury, the Moon, and Io, the amplitude of this signal is as much as 1-10% of the dominant tidal response to long-wavelength shear modulus fluctuations, which exceed about 10% of the mean shear modulus.”
“For Europa, Ganymede, and Enceladus, a shell thickness variation of 50% of the average shell thickness could result in an additional signal of about 1% and about 10% for Jupiter's moons and Enceladus, respectively.”
The authors also discussed how their results can help scientists interpret observations made by missions to a variety of different worlds, from Mercury to the moon to the outer planets of our solar system. .
“Future missions such as BepiColombo and JUICE have the potential to measure these signals,” they said.
“Lateral changes in viscosity affect the distribution of tidal heating.”
“This may promote the thermal evolution of tidal bodies and influence the distribution of active areas.”
of findings will appear in Planetary Science Journal.
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Mark Rovira-Navarro others. 2024. A spectral method for calculating the tides of laterally inhomogeneous objects. planet. Science. J 5, 129; doi: 10.3847/PSJ/ad381f
This article is a version of a press release provided by NASA.
Source: www.sci.news
