Sentences with phrase «tidal bulge»
A tidal bulge refers to the slight distortion or bulge that occurs in the shape of a planet or moon due to the gravitational pull of another celestial body, like a star or a planet. It happens because the gravitational force is not uniform across the entire surface, causing some areas to bulge out or be higher than usual, and other areas to be lower. Full definition
[7] Mercury's surface is also flexed by significant tidal bulges raised by the Sun — the Sun's tides on Mercury are about 17 percent stronger than the Moon's on Earth.
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David Tsang of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues have calculated how the mutual gravitational pull of such stars will distort their shape, creating moving tidal bulges.
Likewise, Miura's team assumes that our planet's mass is raising a tiny but sustained tidal bulge in the sun.
Provided their spacecraft stays healthy and funded, the Juno team is contemplating additional measurements that could further probe Jupiter's interior, such as monitoring tidal bulges raised by large moons whipping around the planet.
While these tiny moons do not affect the tidal forces on Saturn, their orbits are disturbed by Saturn's core tidal bulges.
It's common knowledge that the Moon exerts a gravitational force on our planet and causes tidal bulges.
Interestingly, the researchers found that the moon's overall gravity field is no longer aligned with the topography, as it would have been when the tidal bulges were frozen into the moon's shape.
The Encelade team — lead by Valéry Lainey of the Paris Observatory — provided two key measurements in the research: the rigidity of the tidal bulge, or the Love number — named for Augustus E.H. Love, a famed British mathematician who studied elasticity — and the dissipation factor, which controls the speed at which moons move away.
«This process is similar to the tides,» explains José Crespo: «The rotating ion polarizing the neutral helium atom is a little bit like the moon producing the tidal bulges.»
What's less often taught in class is that those tidal bulges push energy back at the Moon, moving it ever so slightly into a higher orbit.
It's to do with the torque applied to the solar surface layers by Jupiter acting on the tidal bulge produced by Earth and Venus.