Tidal Evolution of Earth-like Exoplanet

Overview

Internal and orbital evolution of Earth if it experienced strong tidal distortion from its host star.

Date

04/09/19

Author

Peter Driscoll

Modules

RadHeat, ThermInt, EqTide

Approx. runtime

10 minutes

This example shows the thermal, magnetic, and orbital evolution of an Earth-like planet using ThermInt, RadHeat, and EqTide. Here we use the “orbit-only” (DB15) tidal model, which is highly idealized. The interior model is 1-D and many free parameters have been tuned to match the modern Earth. This example reproduces the results of Driscoll & Barnes (2015). The generated figures should be compared to their Figures 4 and 5.

To run this example

python makeplot.py <pdf | png>

Expected output

examples/TidalEarth1.png
examples/TidalEarth2.png

Evolution of various properties of a tidally heated Earth-like planet. The initial eccentricity is 0.5, but the semi-major axis varies. The tidal model is very simplified and ignores rotational angular momentum.