Questions tagged [tidal-locking]
Questions regarding a phenomenon when an object has an orbital period that is equal to its rotational period due to gravitational tidal forces.
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If all the Trappist-1 planets are tidally locked, which ones may have temperate zones?
Since all the Trappist-1 planets have circular orbits, it is entirely likely that all them are tidally locked.
If so, which ones of the planets may have temperate zones either on the bright or dark ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Has the Earth-facing side of the Moon that we see today always faced us ever since the Moon got tidally locked? Or does it precess?
Title. Does the Earth-facing side of the Moon slowly precess due to perturbations and torques exerted by other bodies? Or is the side of the Moon we see today the same as when it first got tidally ...
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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, ...
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Why doesn't Earth's leading tidal bulge cause the Moon to start spinning in the opposite direction than its original spin?
Please refer to the image below:
My question is, why doesn't Earth's leading tidal bulge (encircled in the green circle 1) pull on the moon's tidal bulge (encircled in green circle 2), leading to a ...
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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-...
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How would a retrograde satellite experiencing tidal deceleration affect the rotation of the primary?
There are two common scenarios like this one, where an orbiting body orbits its primary slower than the primary rotates, resulting in the orbiting body moving away and the primary experiencing a ...
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Where did the idea that tidally-locked planets have a big hurricane come from?
I've been noticing a bit of a trend in the depiction of tidally-locked habitable planets, where they are shown having a huge hurricane-like storm over the daylight hemisphere. Here's an example, and ...
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How much (more or less) of the moon will be visible as it recedes from the Earth?
The Moon is receding from the Earth, at a rate of about 4 cm per year. We can currently see about 59% of the Moon's surface, from the Earth's surface.
Will the amount of the Moon's surface we can see ...
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Shouldn't tidal locking be impossible for a satellite that has a considerably eccentric orbit?
This popped up into my mind just now. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, and also has a significantly eccentric orbit. This means that its orbital velocity near periapsis is considerably faster than ...
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Does a rotating moon experience greater tidal heating than a tidally locked equivalent?
Tidal heating of a tidally locked moon is relatively straight forward to calculate, even though details of its internal structure is hard to work out in the first place.
By contrast, tidal heating due ...
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Can tidal locking increase rotational kinetic energy? Where does the energy come from then? [closed]
I was thinking about the explanation for how the Moon gets tidally locked with the Earth. We are working in the non-rotating reference frame of the Earth, and assume it is inertial (to an approximate ...
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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 ...
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How can the Earth and the Moon be in synchronous rotation if the Moon won't be in geostationary orbit?
It is said that the Moon moves away from Earth and that during the Sun's red giant or white dwarf phase the Moon will be about 40% farther than now and in a synchronous rotation ("hantle rotation&...
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