The efficiency of convective tidal viscosity in close solar-type binaries

Abstract

The value of the effective convective viscosity, in the framework of the mixing length theory (MLT), is 2 orders of magnitude too small compared to that required by the observational data. Moreover, the reduction of the effective viscosity due to the fast time-variation of the tidal shear in short period binaries, increases the discrepancy to about three orders of magnitude. In this work, we examine the possibility that the apparent inefficiency of turbulent convection is merely a shortcoming of MLT approach. We employ a model for stellar turbulent convection (Canuto, Goldman & Mazzitelli 1996) and use an analytic approximation to the turbulent spectrum. The resulting efficiency is substantially increased; the discrepancy is a factor of 30 down from a factor of 1000. This encouraging result motivates an investigation of the full non-analytic solutions of the turbulent spectrum.