Keep your eye on Gliese 581. Not that the news is necessarily good for our hopes for habitability around that star — in fact, a recent paper suggests quite the opposite. The red dwarf exploded into the public consciousness with the announcement that one of its planets — Gl 581 c — could conceivably support clement temperatures and water at the surface, at least in places. But in exploring that possibility, we’re getting a case study of world-class science at work, analyzing data, offering hypotheses, broadening options. It’s an exciting process to watch.

Gl 581 d is now being analyzed for habitability, while Gl 581 c begins to appear less and less likely as a home to life. It may take decades and new space-based observatories for the issue to be resolved, but we now have a new take on Gl 581 c, embedded in a broader study of tidal evolution as planetary systems evolve. The study has implications not just for rocky worlds but for planetary formation in many scenarios.

The work of Brian Jackson, Richard Greenberg and Rory Barnes (University of Arizona) draws on a key fact: A planet’s orbit can be greatly affected by tides that the planet raises on its star, and on the tides the star raises on the planet. In fact, tidal distortion and orbital evolution work together, tidal forces producing internal heating at the expense of orbital energy. Thus many close-in planets probably formed further out from their host star than their present position. In a typical case, say the authors, tidal heating increases as a planet moves inward and then decreases when the tides circularize the orbit and shut down the heat mechanism.

But each case will be different, the strength and timing of these effects determining a planet’s properties. The team’s intention is to construct heating histories for planets whose radii have been measured, sometimes with results that vary from theory. And that gets me back to Gl 581 c, for in terms of planets with masses less than ten times Earth’s, such heating could have played a role in the planet’s geophysical development. The Arizona team finds that the contribution of tidal energies on two ‘super Earths’ — Gl 581 c and GJ 876 d — should produce a heat flux with profound implications:

Among terrestrial-scale planets, we find that tidal heating may have dominated the geological and geophysical evolution of the planets and control their current character. The tidal heating rate for GJ 876 d may be orders of magnitude greater than the magnitude considered by Valencia et al. to be geophysically significant. For Gl 581 c tidal heating may yield a surface flux about three times greater than Io’s, suggesting the possibility of major geological activity.

Three times that of Io? Gl 581 c looks less hospitable all the time. The case of GJ 876 d is even more extreme. This ‘super-Earth’ of 5.89 Earth masses hasn’t been in the habitability picture because its two-day orbit keeps it far too close to its star for liquid water to exist. But while the planet has been considered vulnerable to tidal stresses, I don’t think anyone was prepared for what the Arizona team found:

…radiogenic heating of GJ 876 d might have been adequate to initiate plate tectonics, but our results indicate that tidal heating may have been a major contributor to the geological and geophysical character of the planet. Tidal heat has provided an important component of the heat budget for this planet, perhaps the dominant component during at least the past ~108 yr. The tidal heating rate would be so large, in fact, that GJ 876 d is unlikely to be a solid, rocky body.

I’ve only focused on two super-Earths here, but the paper also offers interesting takes on planets like HD 209458 b, whose radius is larger than predicted, and HAT-P-2 b, whose radius is well below prediction. Tidal heating histories may help us understand these apparent anomalies. The paper is Jackson, Greenberg and Barnes, “Tidal Heating of Extra-Solar Planets,” accepted by the Astrophysical Journal (abstract).