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3 votes
0 answers
52 views

Would tidally locked Earth-like exoplanets necessarily have hot pole/cold pole atmospheric circulation?

A tidally locked planet orbiting a red dwarf star in its habitable zone would have a rotational period equal to its orbital period, on the order of days or weeks. Given a thick enough atmosphere ...
RobertF's user avatar
  • 183
5 votes
1 answer
413 views

Is a three body gravitating system doomed to collapse?

Suppose we have two gravitating bodies, which are rotating around each other. They are bodies and are affected by deformation caused by tidal forces. Moving tidal waves suck energy from the axial ...
Askold Ilvento's user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
198 views

Are there any bodies in the solar system whose rotation is almost tidally locked or barely tidally locked?

The Moon's rotation is firmly tidally locked to the Earth and the Earth's rotation is firmly tidally unlocked with respect to the Moon. I gather that Mercury's rotation is tidally locked in a 3:2 ...
Roger Wood's user avatar
  • 1,379
3 votes
1 answer
195 views

Does tidal locking also slowly reduce the orbiting body's axial angle?

The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, and it has an axial angle of 6.687 degrees relative to its orbital plane. I'd like to know: did the Moon start out with a higher axial angle? In other words, ...
Humanist's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
61 views

Do retrograde spin-orbit resonances exist?

The end state of rotation of an initially fast-spinning prograde terrestrial planet (in the absence of additional forcings such as "thermal tides" in an atmosphere, e.g. Venus) is a spin-...
user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
532 views

As the Moon and the Earth are predicted to get into tidal lock, how slow would the Earth rotate?

This answer to Will the Earth ever be tidally locked to the Moon? supports the widely held thinking that during the Sun's red giant phase or later the Earth and the Moon should be tidally locked to ...
Ioannes's user avatar
  • 1,090
1 vote
2 answers
266 views

Are exoplanets at dwarf stars less likely to have super-rotating atmospheres or asynchronous tidal locking?

Dwarf stars have terrestrial sized planets orbiting in habitable zones very close to them. These exoplanets are often said to be tidally locked to their star, like the Moon is to Earth, and that they ...
LocalFluff's user avatar
  • 11.4k
1 vote
1 answer
166 views

The drift of the Moon's equatorial rotation velocity

Are there any citation or documentation showing the measured degradation of the Moon's equatorial rotation velocity (thus affecting its moon's axial rotation)? I am looking for the drift of the Moon'...
John Greene's user avatar