Tides in rocky worlds - Impact on habitability

The habitable zone planets around low-mass stars, such as TRAPPIST-1e (Gillon et al. 2017) or Proxima-b (Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016), are the only habitable planets whose atmosphere is being probed/will be probed in the near future (with the JWST or RISTRETTO for instance). Understanding their atmosphere and their climate is therefore paramount.

However due to the low-luminosity of these stars, the planets located in the habitable zone are close-in. Close-in planets are submitted to a variety of star-planet interaction mechanisms: tidal interactions (e.g. Mathis, 2018) and magnetic interactions (e.g. Strugarek et al. 2017), which influence both the orbit and rotation of the planets, but also the direct interaction of the stellar light with the atmosphere which can drive atmospheric escape (Bolmont et al. 2017). These planets are a perfect laboratory for all these processes.

I will mainly discuss the influence of tides on the dynamical (orbital and rotational) parameters which directly influence the climate and the habitability of these planets. I will also talk about the current improvements we are implementing to account for tidal evolution in a more realistic way (Bolmont et al. 2020) and how this can impact the rotation evolution in particular.