Papers › Day and Night: Habitability of Tidally Locked Planets with Sporadic Rotation
Day and Night: Habitability of Tidally Locked Planets with Sporadic Rotation
Cody J. Shakespeare, Jason H. Steffen
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Tidally locked worlds provide a unique opportunity for constraining the probable climates of certain exoplanets. They are unique in that few exoplanet spin and obliquity states are known or will be determined in the near future: both of which are critical in modeling climate. A recent study shows the dynamical conditions present in the TRAPPIST-1 system make rotation and large librations of the substellar point possible for these planets, which are usually assumed to be tidally locked. We independently confirm the tendency for planets in TRAPPIST-1-like systems to sporadically transition from tidally locked libration to slow rotation using N-body simulations. We examine the nature and frequency of these spin states to best inform energy balance models which predict the temperature profile of the planet's surface. Our findings show that tidally locked planets with sporadic rotation are able to be in both long-term persistent states and states with prolonged transient behavior: where frequent transitions between behaviors occur. Quasi-stable spin regimes, where the planet exhibits one spin behavior for up to hundreds of millennia, are likely able to form stable climate systems while the spin behavior is constant. 1D energy balance models show that tidally locked planets with sporadic rotation around M-dwarfs will experience a relatively small change in substellar temperature due to the lower albedo of ice in an infrared dominant stellar spectrum. The exact effects of large changes in temperature profiles on these planets as they rotate require more robust climate models, like 3D global circulation models, to better examine.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections