The competition between turbulent convection and global rotation in planetary and stellar interiors governs the transport of heat and tracers, as well as magnetic field generation. These objects operate in dynamical regimes ranging from weakly rotating convection to the “geostrophic turbulence” regime of rapidly rotating convection. However, the latter regime has remained elusive in the laboratory, despite a worldwide effort to design ever-taller rotating convection cells over the last decade. Building on a recent experimental approach where convection is driven radiatively, we report heat transport measurements in quantitative agreement with this scaling regime, the experimental scaling law being validated against direct numerical simulations (DNS) of the idealized setup. The scaling exponent from both experiments and DNS agrees well with the geostrophic turbulence prediction. The prefactor of the scaling law is greater than the one diagnosed in previous idealized numerical studies, pointing to an unexpected sensitivity of the heat transport efficiency to the precise distribution of heat sources and sinks, which greatly varies from planets to stars.

行星和恒星内部的湍流对流和全球自转之间的竞争决定了热量和示踪剂的传输，以及磁场的产生。这些物体在从弱旋转对流到快速旋转对流的“地转湍流”状态的动态状态下运行。然而，尽管在过去十年中全世界都在努力设计更高的旋转对流电池，但后一种方案在实验室中仍然难以捉摸。基于最近以辐射方式驱动对流的实验方法，我们报告了与这种缩放方案定量一致的热传输测量结果，实验缩放定律针对理想化设置的直接数值模拟 (DNS) 进行了验证。来自实验和 DNS 的缩放指数与地转湍流预测非常吻合。比例定律的前因数大于先前理想化数值研究中诊断的前因数，这表明热传输效率对热源和热汇的精确分布出乎意料的敏感性，从行星到恒星，热源和汇的精确分布差异很大。