Related papers: Alignment of the stellar spin with the orbits of a…
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…
Transiting giant planets provide a natural opportunity to examine stellar obliquities, which offer clues about the origin and dynamical histories of close-in planets. Hot Jupiters orbiting Sun-like stars show a tendency for obliquity…
It is widely assumed that a star and its protoplanetary disk are initially aligned, with the stellar equator parallel to the disk plane. When observations reveal a misalignment between stellar rotation and the orbital motion of a planet,…
Exoplanets are organized in a broad array of orbital configurations that reflect their formation along with billions of years of dynamical processing through gravitational interactions. This history is encoded in the angular momentum…
The obliquity of a star, or the angle between its spin axis and the average orbit normal of its companion planets, provides a unique constraint on that system's evolutionary history. Unlike the Solar System, where the Sun's equator is…
The angle between the spin axis of the host star and the orbit of its planets (i.e., the stellar obliquity) is precious information about the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems. Measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect…
A significant fraction of hot Jupiters have orbital axes misaligned with their host stars' spin axes. The large stellar obliquities of these giants have long been considered potential signatures of high-eccentricity migration, which is…
Chaotic dynamics are expected during and after planet formation, and a leading mechanism to explain large eccentricities of gas giant exoplanets is planet-planet gravitational scattering. The same scattering has been invoked to explain…
About 25 per cent of `hot Jupiters' (extrasolar Jovian-mass planets with close-in orbits) are actually orbiting counter to the spin direction of the star. Perturbations from a distant binary star companion can produce high inclinations, but…
Stellar spin-orbit misalignments (obliquities) in hot Jupiter systems have been extensively probed. Such obliquities may reveal clues about hot Jupiter dynamical histories. Common explanations for generating obliquities include…
The turbulent environment from which stars form may lead to misalignment between the stellar spin and the remnant protoplanetary disk. By using hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we demonstrate that a wide range of stellar…
The presence of gaseous giant planets whose orbits lie in extreme proximity to their host stars ("hot Jupiters"), can largely be accounted for by planetary migration, associated with viscous evolution of proto-planetary nebulae. Recently,…
Observations of exoplanets over the last two decades have revealed a new class of Jupiter-size planets with orbital periods of a few days, the so-called "hot Jupiters". Recent measurements using the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect have shown…
The discovery of giant planets orbiting close to their host stars was one of the most unexpected results of early exoplanetary science. Astronomers have since found that a significant fraction of these 'Hot Jupiters' move on orbits…
Kepler-56 is a multi-planet system containing two coplanar inner planets that are in orbits misaligned with respect to the spin axis of the host star, and an outer planet. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain the broad…
The distribution of spin-orbit angles for systems with wide-separation, tidally detached exoplanets offers a unique constraint on the prevalence of dynamically violent planetary evolution histories. Tidally detached planets provide a…
We provide evidence that the obliquities of stars with close-in giant planets were initially nearly random, and that the low obliquities that are often observed are a consequence of star-planet tidal interactions. The evidence is based on…
The modestly eccentric and non-coplanar orbits of the giant planets pose a challenge to solar system formation theories which generally indicate that the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk in nearly perfectly circular and…
Consider a planet with its orbital angular momentum axis aligned with the spin axis of its host star. To what extent does an inclined distant companion (giant planet or binary star) affect this alignment? We provide an analytic,…
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.…