Videos

Rafa Fuentes - The effects of rotation on entrainment and layered convection in gas giants

Presenter
January 28, 2025
Abstract
Recorded 28 January 2025. Rafa Fuentes of the University of Colorado Boulder presents "The effects of rotation on entrainment and layered convection in gas giants" at IPAM's Rotating Turbulence: Interplay and Separability of Bulk and Boundary Dynamics Workshop. Abstract: Understanding the internal structure of gas giants has been revolutionized by NASA's Juno and Cassini missions, which suggest these planets possess "fuzzy" cores - gradients of heavy elements spanning significant fractions of their radii. Through a combination of 3D hydrodynamic simulations and analytic modeling, we investigated how planetary rotation affects convective mixing and the survival of composition gradients in giant planet interiors. First, we investigated how rotation modifies the efficiency of convective mixing at the boundary between stable and unstable regions. We developed scaling laws for convective velocities and entrainment rates in rotating systems, validated through targeted numerical experiments. Building on these results, our second study explored how rotation influences the evolution and erosion of semiconvective staircases - layered convective structures arising from double-diffusive instabilities - that could explain the observed fuzzy cores. Together, these studies provide new insights into the role of rotation in preserving compositional gradients within giant planets, with important implications for their structure and evolution. Learn more online at: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/workshops/rotating-turbulence-interplay-and-separability-of-bulk-and-boundary-dynamics/