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Register a new userThe Turbulent Origin of Spin-Orbit Misalignment in Planetary Systems
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The turbulent environment from which stars form may lead to misalignment between the stellar spin and the remnant protoplanetary disk. By using hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we demonstrate that a wide range of stellar obliquities may be produced as a by-product of forming a star within a turbulent environment. We present a simple semi-analytic model that reveals this connection between the turbulent motions and the orientation of a star and its disk. Our results are consistent with the observed obliquity distribution of hot Jupiters. Migration of misaligned hot Jupiters may, therefore, be due to tidal dissipation in the disk, rather than tidal dissipation of the star-planet interaction.
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Stars hosting hot Jupiters are often observed to have high obliquities, whereas stars with multiple co-planar planets have been seen to have low obliquities. This has been interpreted as evidence that hot-Jupiter formation is linked to dynamical disruption, as opposed to planet migration through a protoplanetary disk. We used asteroseismology to measure a large obliquity for Kepler-56, a red giant star hosting two transiting co-planar planets. These observations show that spin-orbit misalignments are not confined to hot-Jupiter systems. Misalignments in a broader class of systems had been predicted as a consequence of torques from wide-orbiting companions, and indeed radial-velocity measurements revealed a third companion in a wide orbit in the Kepler-56 system.
It has been widely thought that measuring the misalignment angle between the orbital plane of a transiting exoplanet and the spin of its host star was a good discriminator between different migration processes for hot-Jupiters. Specifically, well-aligned hot-Jupiter systems (as measured by the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect) were thought to have formed via migration through interaction with a viscous disk, while misaligned systems were thought to have undergone a more violent dynamical history. These conclusions were based on the assumption that the planet-forming disk was well-aligned with the host star. Recent work by a number of authors has challenged this assumption by proposing mechanisms that act to drive the star-disk interaction out of alignment during the pre-main sequence phase. We have estimated the stellar rotation axis of a sample of stars which host spatially resolved debris disks. Comparison of our derived stellar rotation axis inclination angles with the geometrically measured debris-disk inclinations shows no evidence for a misalignment between the two.
We present the analysis of 4 months of Kepler photometry of the K4V star HAT-P-11, including 26 transits of its super-Neptune planet. The transit data exhibit numerous anomalies that we interpret as passages of the planet over dark starspots. These spot-crossing anomalies preferentially occur at two specific phases of the transit. These phases can be understood as the intersection points between the transit chord and the active latitudes of the host star, where starspots are most abundant. Based on the measured characteristics of spot-crossing anomalies, and previous observations of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, we find two solutions for the stellar obliquity (psi) and active latitude (l): either psi = 106 and l = 19.7, or psi = 97 and l = 67 (all in degrees). If the active latitude changes with time in analogy with the butterfly diagram of the Suns activity cycle, future observations should reveal changes in the preferred phases of spot-crossing anomalies.
Eclipsing binary DI Herculis (DI Her) is known to exhibit anomalously slow apsidal precession, below the rate predicted by the general relativity. Recent measurements of the Rossiter-McLauglin effect indicate that stellar spins in DI Her are almost orthogonal to the orbital angular momentum, which explains the anomalous precession in agreement with the earlier theoretical suggestion by Shakura. However, these measurements yield only the projections of the spin-orbit angles onto the sky plane, leaving the spin projection onto our line of sight unconstrained. Here we describe a method of determining the full three-dimensional spin orientation of the binary components relying on the use of the gravity darkening effect, which is significant for the rapidly rotating stars in DI Her. Gravity darkening gives rise to nonuniform brightness distribution over the stellar surface, the pattern of which depends on the stellar spin orientation. Using archival photometric data obtained during multiple eclipses spread over several decades we are able to constrain the unknown spin angles in DI Her with this method, finding that spin axes of both stars lie close to the plane of the sky. Our procedure fully accounts for the precession of stellar spins over the long time span of observations.
Many hot Jupiter (HJ) systems have been observed to have their stellar spin axis misaligned with the planets orbital angular momentum axis. The origin of this spin-orbit misalignment and the formation mechanism of HJs remain poorly understood. A number of recent works have suggested that gravitational interactions between host stars, protoplanetary disks, and inclined binary companions may tilt the stellar spin axis with respect to the disks angular angular momentum axis, producing planetary systems with misaligned orbits. These previous works considered idealized disk evolution models and neglected the gravitational influence of newly formed planets. In this paper, we explore how disk photoevaporation and planet formation and migration affect the inclination evolution of planet-star-disk-binary systems. We take into account planet-disk interactions and the gravitational spin-orbit coupling between the host star and the planet. We find that the rapid depletion of the inner disk via photoevaporation reduces the excitation of stellar obliquities. Depending on the formation and migration history of HJs, the spin-orbit coupling between the star and the planet may reduces and even completely suppress the excitation of stellar obliquities. Our work constrains the formation/migration history of HJs. On the other hand, planetary systems with cold Jupiters or close-in super-earths may experience excitation of stellar obliquities in the presence of distant inclined companions.
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