Motivated by its applications to the interior dynamics of planets, the problem of thermal convection in rapidly rotating, self-gravitating fluid bodies has been widely modeled in spheres or spherical shells, which implicitly neglects the flattening effect due to the centrifugal force. However, recent Juno and Cassini missions have measured the gravitational fields of Jupiter and Saturn with extremely high accuracy such that the rotational flattening effects cannot be neglected anymore in studies of interior fluid dynamics. In our recent works, for the first time, thermal instabilities and fully nonlinear thermal convections are considered in oblate spheroidal cavities whose geometric shape must be self-consistently determined by the theory of figure. The linear critical properties are analytically derived. The dependence of the dynamical state of thermal convection on the oblateness of the spheroid is systematically explored. Several newly discovered linear and nonlinear phenomena are to be reported in this talk.

BIO

Dr. Dali Kong graduated from the Department of Astronomy, Nanjing University, in 2008 and earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Exeter in 2012. He joined Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2017 after spending five years as a Postdoc fellow at the Centre for Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics, University of Exeter. Dr. Kong mainly works in the field of geophysical and astrophysical fluid dynamics (GAFD) and is particularly skilled at analyzing the dynamics of rapidly rotating systems.