Related papers: Convective Lengthscale in Planetary Cores
Convection is the main heat transport mechanism in the Earth's liquid core and is thought to power the dynamo that generates the geomagnetic field. Core convection is strongly constrained by rotation while being turbulent. Given the…
Convective flow in Earth's iron-rich liquid core drives self-sustained dynamo action, generating Earth's magnetic field, which is strongest among all terrestrial planets of the solar system. Rock records show that this magnetic field has…
Context: Convectively-driven flows play a crucial role in the dynamo processes that are responsible for producing magnetic activity in stars and planets. It is still not fully understood why many astrophysical magnetic fields have a…
The numerical simulations of planetary dynamos still operate in a regime very far from the planets. For example, it seems unlikely that viscous forces are at all significant in planetary interiors, yet some of the simulations display a…
The interiors of many planets consist mostly of fluid layers. When these layers are subject to superadiabatic temperature or compositional gradients, turbulent convection transports heat and momentum. In addition, planets are fast rotators.…
Condensible substances are nearly ubiquitous in planetary atmospheres. For the most familiar case-water vapor in Earth's present climate-the condensible gas is dilute, in the sense that its concentration is everywhere small relative to the…
The amount and spatial pattern of heat extracted from cores of terrestrial planets is ultimately controlled by the thermal structure of the lower rocky mantle. Using the most common model to tackle this problem, a rapidly rotating and…
A monomodal model for stellar and planetary convection is derived for the magnitude of the rms velocity, degree of superadiabaticity, and characteristic length scale as a function of rotation rate as well as with thermal and viscous…
Convection is a fundamental mechanism for energy transport in stars and planets, playing a pivotal role in shaping their structures and evolution. The Mixing-Length Theory, a monomodal approach to convection, is widely adopted and…
Convection-driven flows in planetary interiors exhibit rich dynamics owing to multiple spatio-temporally varying forcing conditions and physical constraints. In particular, the churning of liquid metals in the Earth's outer core,…
Earth's geodynamo has operated for over 3.5 billion years. The magnetic field is currently powered by thermocompositional convection in the outer core, which involves the release of light elements and latent heat as the inner core…
Convection is a key transport phenomenon important in many different areas, from hydrodynamics and ocean circulation to planetary atmospheres or stellar physics. However its microscopic understanding still remains challenging. Here we…
Convection in the solar interior is thought to comprise structures on a spectrum of scales. This conclusion emerges from phenomenological studies and numerical simulations, though neither covers the proper range of dynamical parameters of…
Rotating convective turbulence is ubiquitously found across geophysical settings, such as surface and subsurface oceans, planetary atmospheres, molten metal planetary cores, magma chambers, and magma oceans. Depending on the thermal and…
The Sun is a non-equilibrium dissipative system subjected to an energy flow which originates in its core. Convective overshooting motions create temperature and velocity structures which show a temporal and spatial evolution. As a result,…
We study how the pattern of thermal convection and differential rotation in the interior of a giant gaseous planet is affected by the presence of a small solid core as a function of the planetary rotation rate. We show, using 2D anelastic,…
Stably-stratified layers may be present at the top of the electrically-conducting fluid layers of many planets either because the temperature gradient is locally subadiabatic or because a stable composition gradient is maintained by the…
Convection is ubiquitous in stellar and planetary interiors where it likely plays an integral role in the generation of magnetic fields. As the interiors of these objects remain hidden from direct observation, numerical models of convection…
We report a calculation of time-dependent quasi-geostrophic core flows for 1940-2010. Inverting recursively for an ensemble of solutions, we evaluate the main source of uncertainties, namely the model errors arising from interactions…
Azimuthal accelerations of cylindrical surfaces co-axial with the rotation axis have been inferred to exist in Earth's fluid core on the basis of magnetic field observations and changes in the length-of-day. These accelerations have a…