English

Free-Floating Planets, Survivor Planets, Captured Planets and Binary Planets from Stellar Flybys

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2024-07-22 v2 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

In star clusters, close stellar encounters can strongly impact the architecture of a planetary system or even destroy it. We present a systematic study on the effects of stellar flybys on two-planet systems. When such a system experiences flybys, one or both planets can be ejected, forming free-floating planets (FFPs), captured planets (CPs) around the flyby star, and free-floating binary planets (BPs); the remaining single-surviving-planets (SSPs) can have their orbital radii and eccentricities greatly changed. Through numerical experiments, we calculate the formation fractions (or branching ratios) of FFPs, SSPs, CPs and BPs as a function of the pericenter distance of the flyby, and use them to derive analytical expressions for the formation rates of FFPs, SSPs, CPs and BPs in general cluster environments. We find that the production rates of FFPs and SSPs are similar (for initial planet semi-major axis ratio a1/a2=0.60.8a_1/a_2=0.6-0.8), while the rate for CPs is a few times smaller. The formation fraction of BPs depends strongly on a1/a2a_1/a_2 and on the planet masses. For Jupiter-mass planets, the formation fraction of BPs is always less than 1%1\% (for a1/a2=0.8a_1/a_2=0.8) and typically much smaller (0.2%\lesssim 0.2\% for a1/a20.7a_1/a_2\lesssim 0.7). The fraction remains less than 1%1\% when considering 4MJ4M_{\rm J} planets. Overall, when averaging over all flybys, the production rate of BPs is less than 0.1%0.1\% of that for FFPs. We also derive the velocity distribution of FFPs produced by stellar flybys, and the orbital parameter distributions of SSPs, CPs and BPs. These results can be used in future studies of exotic planets (including FFPs) and planetary systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.07224,
  title  = {Free-Floating Planets, Survivor Planets, Captured Planets and Binary Planets from Stellar Flybys},
  author = {Fangyuan Yu and Dong Lai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.07224},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 pages, 13+9 figures, accepted to ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:16:34.589Z