No Arabic abstract
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.
We study orbital inclination changes associated with the precession of a disc-planet system that occurs through gravitational interaction with a binary companion on an inclined orbit. We investigate whether this scenario can account for giant planets on close orbits highly inclined to the stellar equatorial plane. We obtain conditions for maintaining approximate coplanarity and test them with SPH-simulations. For parameters of interest, the system undergoes approximate rigid body precession with modest warping while the planets migrate inwards. Because of pressure forces, disc self-gravity is not needed to maintain the configuration. We consider a disc and single planet for different initial inclinations of the binary orbit to the midplane of the combined system and a system of three planets for which migration leads to dynamical instability that reorders the planets. As the interaction is dominated by the time averaged quadrupole component of the binarys perturbing potential, results for a circular orbit can be scaled to apply to eccentric orbits. The system responded adiabatically when changes to binary orbital parameters occurred on time scales exceeding the orbital period. Accordingly inclination changes are maintained under its slow removal. Thus the scenario for generating high inclination planetary orbits studied here, is promising.
Many of the observed spin--orbit alignment properties of exoplanets can be explained in the context of the primordial disk misalignment model, in which an initially aligned protoplanetary disk is torqued by a distant stellar companion on a misaligned orbit, resulting in a precessional motion that can lead to large-amplitude oscillations of the spin--orbit angle. We consider a variant of this model in which the companion is a giant planet with an orbital radius of a few au. Guided by the results of published numerical simulations, we model the dynamical evolution of this system by dividing the disk into inner and outer parts---separated at the location of the planet---that behave as distinct, rigid disks. We show that the planet misaligns the inner disk even as the orientation of the outer disk remains unchanged. In addition to the oscillations induced by the precessional motion, whose amplitude is larger the smaller the initial inner-disk-to-planet mass ratio, the spin--orbit angle also exhibits a secular growth in this case---driven by ongoing mass depletion from the disk---that becomes significant when the inner disks angular momentum drops below that of the planet. Altogether, these two effects can produce significant misalignment angles for the inner disk, including retrograde configurations. We discuss these results within the framework of the Stranded Hot Jupiter scenario and consider their implications, including to the interpretation of the alignment properties of debris disks.
In our solar system, Mars-sized protoplanets frequently collided with each other during the last stage of terrestrial planet formation called the giant impact stage. Giant impacts eject a large amount of material from the colliding protoplanets into the terrestrial planet region, which may form debris disks with observable infrared excesses. Indeed, tens of warm debris disks around young solar-type stars have been observed. Here, we quantitatively estimate the total mass of ejected materials during the giant impact stages. We found that $sim$0.4 times the Earths mass is ejected in total throughout the giant impact stage. Ejected materials are ground down by collisional cascade until micron-sized grains are blown out by radiation pressure. The depletion timescale of these ejected materials is determined primarily by the mass of the largest body among them. We conducted high-resolution simulations of giant impacts to accurately obtain the mass of the largest ejected body. We then calculated the evolution of the debris disks produced by a series of giant impacts and depleted by collisional cascades to obtain the infrared excess evolution of the debris disks. We found that the infrared excess is almost always higher than the stellar infrared flux throughout the giant impact stage ($sim$100 Myr) and is sometimes $sim$10 times higher immediately after a giant impact. Therefore, giant impact stages would explain the infrared excess from most observed warm debris disks. The observed fraction of stars with warm debris disks indicates that the formation probability of our solar system-like terrestrial planets is approximately 10%.
Recent observations of several protoplanetary discs have found evidence of departures from flat, circular motion in the inner regions of the disc. One possible explanation for these observations is a disc warp, which could be induced by a planet on a misaligned orbit. We present three-dimensional numerical simulations of the tidal interaction between a protoplanetary disc and a misaligned planet. For low planet masses we show that our simulations accurately model the evolution of inclined planet orbit (up to moderate inclinations). For a planet massive enough to carve a gap, the disc is separated into two components and the gas interior and exterior to the planet orbit evolve separately, forming an inner and outer disc. Due to the inclination of the planet, a warp develops across the planet orbit such that there is a relative tilt and twist between these discs. We show that when other parameters are held constant, the relative inclination that develops between the inner and outer disc depends on the outer radius of the total disc modelled. For a given disc mass, our results suggest that the observational relevance of the warp depends more strongly on the mass of the planet rather than the inclination of the orbit.
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.