On the alignment of debris disks and their host stars' rotation axis -implications for spin-orbit misalignment in exoplanetary systems
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1009.4132,
title = {On the alignment of debris disks and their host stars' rotation axis -implications for spin-orbit misalignment in exoplanetary systems},
author = {C. A. Watson and S. P. Littlefair and C. Diamond and A. Collier Cameron and A. Fitzsimmons and E. Simpson and V. Moulds and D. Pollacco},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1009.4132},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted version for publication in the Letters of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Includes minor changes to abstract and introduction and reanalysis of statistics