Astronomy & Celestial Mechanics
the sky, computed
Concept

Viscosity — where it appears

The transport of momentum between neighbouring layers of a differentially rotating disc. In an astrophysical disc it is not molecular but produced by turbulence or by self-gravitating wakes, and it is measured indirectly from how fast structures spread or how sharply they end.

Named by 5 essays across 3 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The temperature of a disc around a stellar black hole. Effective temperature against radius, in units of the inner edge, for a stellar black hole of 10 solar masses accreting 10⁻⁸ solar masses a year. Two features are structural. The profile turns over rather than rising all the way in: the factor (1 − √(r_in/r)) is the statement that no torque acts across the inner edge, so nothing is dissipated there and the peak sits at 49/36 of it, measured here at 1.361. And outside a few inner radii the run is exactly r^−3/4, drawn as the dashed line, which is what makes a disc's spectrum broad: every decade of radius contributes at a temperature a factor of 5.6 lower. The peak is 3.46·10⁶ K here, so the disc radiates in X-rays, and integrating the whole profile gives 4.72·10³⁰ W — which is GMṀ/2r_in to a per cent, half the binding energy released and no more, because the other half is still going round.

The disc that has to throw angular momentum away

Matter cannot simply fall onto a compact object. At the energy it arrives with, it has far too much angular momentum, and the only way in is for some of it to be carried outwards — which is what a disc is for.

stars · Accretion An edge where two torques balance, 21 kilometres from the shepherd. Two torques on the edge of a ring, against distance from a shepherding moon, both axes logarithmic and both scaled by the same combination of surface density, radius and orbital rate so that only their shapes are being compared. The flat line is the viscous torque, which comes from collisions between ring particles and does not care how far away anything is; it is drawn for a kinematic viscosity of 12 square centimetres a second, within the range ring seismology gives. The falling line is the moon's, summed over the first-order resonances that crowd together as the gap narrows, which makes it an inverse cube. A flat curve and an inverse cube cross once, and the crossing is where an edge can sit: closer in the moon wins and pushes the material back, further out viscosity wins and the ring spreads. For Daphnis and the Keeler gap the balance lands 20.8 kilometres out against a measured half-width of 21, which is agreement to well inside the uncertainty on the viscosity — and it is the only handle anybody has on that viscosity, since the quantity being inferred is the collision rate among particles a metre across, a billion kilometres away.

An edge is a balance, not a boundary

A ring of particles spreads, because collisions move angular momentum outward. Something has to push back, and the something is a small moon whose torque falls as the inverse cube of the gap. A flat curve and an inverse cube cross once, and the crossing is the sharp edge — which is why an edge exists at all rather than a gradient.

gravitation · Planetary rings An edge where two torques balance, 21 kilometres from the shepherd. Two torques on the edge of a ring, against distance from a shepherding moon, both axes logarithmic and both scaled by the same combination of surface density, radius and orbital rate so that only their shapes are being compared. The flat line is the viscous torque, which comes from collisions between ring particles and does not care how far away anything is; it is drawn for a kinematic viscosity of 12 square centimetres a second, within the range ring seismology gives. The falling line is the moon's, summed over the first-order resonances that crowd together as the gap narrows, which makes it an inverse cube. A flat curve and an inverse cube cross once, and the crossing is where an edge can sit: closer in the moon wins and pushes the material back, further out viscosity wins and the ring spreads. For Daphnis and the Keeler gap the balance lands 20.8 kilometres out against a measured half-width of 21, which is agreement to well inside the uncertainty on the viscosity — and it is the only handle anybody has on that viscosity, since the quantity being inferred is the collision rate among particles a metre across, a billion kilometres away.

A torque that nearly cancels

A planet embedded in a gas disc pulls on the material inside its orbit and outside it, and the two torques are almost equal and opposite. What survives the subtraction is a per cent of either, and it is still enough to carry a planet from where it formed to its star in less time than the disc lasts.

exoplanets · Planet migration Dissipation against viscosity for Io: a peak at 10^13.5 Pa s, and two solutions at the observed rate. The imaginary part of the Love number — the part that turns tidal work into heat — against the viscosity of the body's interior, for a Maxwell rheology at Io's size, density and forcing period. Both axes are logarithmic and the curve is not monotonic, which is the whole content of the figure. At high viscosity the body is elastic: it stores the energy the tide puts in and gives it back, and dissipates nothing. At low viscosity it is fluid: it deforms all the way and does so in phase with the forcing, and dissipates nothing again. Everything happens in between, at viscosities for which the Maxwell time — viscosity divided by rigidity — is comparable to the orbital period, and the peak here is 0.735 at 10^13.5 pascal seconds. Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions. The peak is an upper limit: a homogeneous body of this size cannot dissipate more than that however its viscosity is chosen, so a measured heat flow above it would refute the model rather than constrain it. And below the peak the observed value is met twice — at 10^11.5 and at 10^15.5 pascal seconds — so a heat flow alone does not say which side of the peak the interior is on. Breaking that degeneracy needs a second observable, and the usual one is the phase of the response rather than its size. The picture treats the body as one homogeneous Maxwell solid, which is certainly wrong for a moon with a molten layer; a partial melt concentrates the dissipation and shifts the peak.

One heat flow, and two viscosities

Io radiates a hundred thousand gigawatts of tidal heat, and that number is supposed to say something about the rock inside it. It does, and not what one would expect — because dissipation vanishes at both extremes of viscosity, the measured heat is produced by two different interiors and cannot choose between them.

gravitation · Tidal heating What Io dissipates depends on how fast the tide is applied. The dissipative part of the Love number, −Im k₂, against the period of the forcing, for Io at an interior viscosity of 1e+16 Pa s. Two rheologies are drawn: a Maxwell solid, a spring and a dashpot in series, and an Andrade solid, which adds the anelastic creep every real material shows in the laboratory and a Maxwell body does not, with an exponent of 0.3. They agree for tides slower than the Maxwell time of 1.9 days, where the body has time to flow and the transient is irrelevant. They part completely for faster ones: at the shortest period drawn the Andrade body dissipates 20 times what the Maxwell body does. A quality factor quoted without a period is half a number, and which half is missing depends on a rheology measured in a laboratory rather than derived.

A quality factor quoted without a period is half a number

The tidal response of a solid body is not a constant. It is a function of how fast the tide is applied, and two rheologies that agree perfectly about a slow tide disagree by orders of magnitude about a quick one — so the same moon has one Love number at its orbital period and a different one at the period of its own libration.

gravitation · Love numbers

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Andrade rheologyAngular momentumMaxwell rheologyQuality factorResonanceRigiditySurface densityTidal dissipationTorqueAccretion discAnelasticityAngular momentum transport

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