English

Re-inflation of warm and hot Jupiters

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2021-03-15 v3 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Understanding the anomalous radii of many transiting hot gas giant planets is a fundamental problem of planetary science. Recent detections of re-inflated warm Jupiters orbiting post-main-sequence stars and the re-inflation of hot Jupiters while their host stars evolve on the main-sequence may help constrain models for the anomalous radii of hot Jupiters. In this work, we present evolution models studying the re-inflation of gas giants to determine how varying the depth and intensity of deposited heating affects both main-sequence re-inflation of hot Jupiters and post-main-sequence re-inflation of warm Jupiters. We find that deeper heating is required to re-inflate hot Jupiters than is needed to suppress their cooling, and that the timescale of re-inflation decreases with increasing heating rate and depth. We find a strong degeneracy between heating rate and depth, with either strong shallow heating or weak deep heating providing an explanation for main-sequence re-inflation of hot Jupiters. This degeneracy between heating rate and depth can be broken in the case of post-main-sequence re-inflation of warm Jupiters, as the inflation must be rapid to occur within post-main-sequence evolution timescales. We also show that the dependence of heating rate on incident stellar flux inferred from the sample of hot Jupiters can explain re-inflation of both warm and hot Jupiters. TESS will obtain a large sample of warm Jupiters orbiting post-main-sequence stars, which will help to constrain the mechanism(s) causing the anomalous radii of gas giant planets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.04877,
  title  = {Re-inflation of warm and hot Jupiters},
  author = {Thaddeus D. Komacek and Daniel P. Thorngren and Eric D. Lopez and Sivan Ginzburg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.04877},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

15 pages, 13 figures, updated to reflect published version