Tidal heating tagged posts

By staring into the hellish landscape of Jupiter’s moon Io – the most volcanically active location in the solar system – Cornell University astronomers have been able to study a fundamental process in planetary formation and evolution: tidal heating.

“Tidal heating plays an important role in the heating and orbital evolution of celestial bodies,” said Alex Hayes, professor of astronomy.

“It provides the warmth necessary to form and sustain subsurface oceans in the moons around giant planets like Jupi...

Jupiter’s moons are hotter than they should be, for being so far from the sun. In a process called tidal heating, gravitational tugs from Jupiter’s moons and the planet itself stretch and squish the moons enough to warm them. As a result, some of the icy moons contain interiors warm enough to host oceans of liquid water, and in the case of the rocky moon Io, tidal heating melts rock into magma.

Researchers previously believed that the gas giant Jupiter was responsible for most of the tidal heating associated with the liquid interiors of the moons, but a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters found that moon-moon interactions may be more responsible for the heating than Jupiter alone.

“It’s surprising because the moons are so much smaller than Jupiter...

Jupiter and Io. Tidal heating is responsible for driving the most volcanically active body in our solar system, Jupiter’s moon Io. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Goddard Space Flight Center

A planet’s magnetic field emanates from its core and is thought to deflect the charged particles of the stellar wind, protecting the atmosphere from being lost to space. Magnetic fields, born from the cooling of a planet’s interior, could also protect life on the surface from harmful radiation, as Earth’s magnetic field protects us.

Low-mass stars are among the most common in the universe...