English

Tidal interactions in rotating multiple stars and their impact on their evolution

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2015-06-23 v1

Abstract

Tidal dissipation in stars is one of the key physical mechanisms that drive the evolution of binary and multiple stars. As in the Earth oceans, it corresponds to the resonant excitation of their eigenmodes of oscillation and their damping. Therefore, it strongly depends on the internal structure, rotation, and dissipative mechanisms in each component. In this work, we present a local analytical modeling of tidal gravito-inertial waves excited in stellar convective and radiative regions respectively. This model allows us to understand in details the properties of the resonant tidal dissipation as a function of the excitation frequencies, the rotation, the stratification, and the viscous and thermal properties of the studied fluid regions. Then, the frequencies, height, width at half-height, and number of resonances as well as the non-resonant equilibrium tide are derived analytically in asymptotic regimes that are relevant in stellar interiors. Finally, we demonstrate how viscous dissipation of tidal waves leads to a strongly erratic orbital evolution in the case of a coplanar binary system. We characterize such a non-regular dynamics as a function of the height and width of resonances, which have been previously characterized thanks to our local fluid model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1410.3103,
  title  = {Tidal interactions in rotating multiple stars and their impact on their evolution},
  author = {P. Auclair-Desrotour and S. Mathis and C. Le Poncin-Lafitte},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.3103},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

2 pages, 1 figure, IAU 307 symposium proceedings, New windows on massive stars: asteroseismology, interferometry, and spectropolarimetry, Eds. G. Meynet, C. Georgy, J. H. Groh, and P. Stee

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:20:48.479Z