Concerning thermal tides on hot Jupiters

By analogy with a mechanism proposed by Gold and Soter to explain the retrograde rotation of Venus, Arras and Socrates suggest that thermal tides may excite hot jovian exoplanets into nonsynchronous rotation, and perhaps also noncircular orbits. It is shown here that because of the absence of a solid surface above the convective core of a jovian planet, the coupling of the gravitational and thermal tides vanishes to zeroth order in the ratio of the atmospheric scale height to the planetary radius. At the next order, the effect probably has the sign opposite to that claimed by the latter authors, hence reinforcing synchronous and circular orbits.