No Arabic abstract
Orbits of close-in planets can shrink significantly due to dissipation of tidal energy in a host star. This process can result in star-planet coalescence within the Galactic lifetime. In some cases, such events can be accompanied by an optical or/and UV/X-ray transient. Potentially, these outbursts can be observed in near future with new facilities such as LSST from distances about few Mpc. We use a population synthesis model to study this process and derive the rate of star-planet mergers of different types. Mostly, planets are absorbed by red giants. However, these events, happening with the rate about 3 per year, mostly do not produce detectable transients. The rate of mergers with main sequence stars depends on the effectiveness of tidal dissipation; for reasonable values of stellar tidal quality factor, such events happen in a Milky Way-like galaxy approximately once in 70 yrs or more rarely. This rate is dominated by planets with low masses. Such events do not produce bright transients having maximum luminosities $lesssim 10^{36.5}$erg s$^{-1}$. Brighter events, related to massive planets, with maximum luminosity $sim 10^{37.5}$--$10^{38}$erg s$^{-1}$, have the rate nearly five times smaller.
We consider the evolution of a binary system interacting due to tidal effects without restriction on the orientation of the orbital, and where significant, spin angular momenta, and orbital eccentricity. We work in the low tidal forcing frequency regime in the equilibrium tide approximation. Internal degrees of freedom are fully taken into account for one component, the primary. In the case of the companion the spin angular momentum is assumed small enough to be neglected but internal energy dissipation is allowed for as this can be significant for orbital circularisation in the case of planetary companions. We obtain a set of equations governing the evolution of the orbit resulting from tidal effects. These depend on the masses and radii of the binary components, the form and orientation of the orbit, and for each involved component, the spin rate, the Coriolis force, the normalised rate of energy dissipation associated with the equilibrium tide due to radiative processes and viscosity, and the classical apsidal motion constant. These depend on stellar parameters with no need of additional assumptions or a phenomenological approach as has been invoked in the past. They can be used to determine the evolution of systems with initial significant misalignment of spin and orbital angular momenta as hypothesised for systems containing Hot Jupiters. The inclusion of the Coriolis force may lead to evolution of the inclination between orbital and spin angular momenta and precession of the orbital plane which may have observational consequences.
The dynamical history of stars influences the formation and evolution of planets significantly. To explore the influence of dynamical history on planet formation and evolution from observations, we assume that stars who experienced significantly different dynamical histories tend to have different relative velocities. Utilizing the accurate Gaia-Kepler Stellar Properties Catalog, we select single main-sequence stars and divide these stars into three groups according to their relative velocities, i.e. high-V, medium-V, and low-V stars. After considering the known biases from Kepler data and adopting prior and posterior correction to minimize the influence of stellar properties on planet occurrence rate, we find that high-V stars have a lower occurrence rate of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes (1--4 R$_{rm oplus}$, P<100 days) and higher occurrence rate of sub-Earth (0.5--1 R$_{ oplus}$, P<30 days) than low-V stars. Additionally, high-V stars have a lower occurrence rate of hot Jupiter sized planets (4--20 R$_{oplus}$, P<10 days) and a slightly higher occurrence rate of warm or cold Jupiter sized planets (4--20 R$_{oplus}$, 10<P<400 days). After investigating the multiplicity and eccentricity, we find that high-V planet hosts prefer a higher fraction of multi-planets systems and lower average eccentricity, which is consistent with the eccentricity-multiplicity dichotomy of Kepler planetary systems. All these statistical results favor the scenario that the high-V stars with large relative velocity may experience fewer gravitational events, while the low-V stars may be influenced by stellar clustering significantly.
From its discovery, the WASP-18 system with its massive transiting planet on a tight orbit was identified as a unique laboratory for studies on tidal planet-star interactions. In an analysis of Doppler data, which include five new measurements obtained with the HIRES/Keck-I instrument between 2012 and 2018, we show that the radial velocity signal of the photosphere following the planetary tidal potential can be distilled for the host star. Its amplitude is in agreement with both theoretical predictions of the equilibrium tide approximation and an ellipsoidal modulation observed in an orbital phase curve. Assuming a circular orbit, we refine system parameters using photometric time series from TESS. With a new ground-based photometric observation, we extend the span of transit timing observations to 28 years in order to probe the rate of the orbital period shortening. Since we found no departure from a constant-period model, we conclude that the modified tidal quality parameter of the host star must be greater than 3.9x10^6 with 95% confidence. This result is in line with conclusions drawn from studies of the population of hot Jupiters, predicting that the efficiency of tidal dissipation is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude weaker. As the WASP-18 system is one of the prime candidates for detection of orbital decay, further timing observations are expected to push the boundaries of our knowledge on stellar interiors.
The multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler mission show an excess of planet pairs with period ratios just wide of exact commensurability for first-order resonances like 2:1 and 3:2. In principle, these planet pairs could have both resonance angles associated with the resonance librating if the orbital eccentricities are sufficiently small, because the width of first-order resonances diverges in the limit of vanishingly small eccentricity. We consider a widely-held scenario in which pairs of planets were captured into first-order resonances by migration due to planet-disk interactions, and subsequently became detached from the resonances, due to tidal dissipation in the planets. In the context of this scenario, we find a constraint on the ratio of the planets tidal dissipation function and Love number that implies that some of the Kepler planets are likely solid. However, tides are not strong enough to move many of the planet pairs to the observed separations, suggesting that additional dissipative processes are at play.
We explore the impact of outer stellar companions on the occurrence rate of giant planets detected with radial velocities. We searched for stellar and planetary companions to a volume-limited sample of solar-type stars within 25 pc. Using adaptive optics imaging from the Lick 3m and Palomar 200 Telescopes, we characterized the multiplicity of our sample stars, down to the bottom of the main sequence. With these data, we confirm field star multiplicity statistics from previous surveys. We combined three decades of radial velocity data from the California Planet Search with new RV data from Keck/HIRES and APF/Levy to search for planets in the same systems. Using an updated catalog of both stellar and planetary companions and injection/recovery tests to determine our sensitivity, we measured the occurrence rate of planets among the single and multiple star systems. We found that planets with masses of 0.1-10 $M_{Jup}$ and semi-major axes of 0.1-10 AU have an occurrence rate of $0.18^{+0.04}_{-0.03}$ planets per single star, and $0.12pm0.04$ planets per binary primary. Only one planet-hosting binary system in our sample had a binary separation $<100$ AU, and none had a separation $<50$ AU. We found planet occurrence rates of $0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.06}$ planets per star for binaries with separation $a_B > 100$ AU, and $0.04^{+0.04}_{-0.02}$ planets per star for binaries with separation $a_B<100$ AU. The similarity in the planet occurrence rate around single stars and wide primaries implies that wide binary systems should host more planets than single star systems, since they have more potential host stars. We estimated a system-wide planet occurrence rate of 0.3 planets per wide binary system for binaries with separations $a_B > 100$ AU. Finally, we found evidence that giant planets in binary systems have a different semi-major axis distribution than their counterparts in single star systems.