A Heartbreak Star

In this talk, I will describe tidal wave breaking on the surface of a massive "heartbeat" star.  Each periapse passage in this eccentric binary system, tides with amplitudes so large that they lose phase coherence and break are raised.  The chance to view this process in action gives us a window into the physics and consequences of nonlinear tidal dissipation.  I will describe modeling and simulations of this system, in which we see that tidal wave breaking drives the system's orbit to decay observably, and spins the stellar surface to the breakup limit.

Speaker: Morgan MacLeod, UC Berkeley