Stellar obliquities in exoplanetary systems

Abstract

The rotation of a star and the revolutions of its planets are not necessarily aligned. This article reviews the measurement techniques, key findings, and theoretical interpretations related to the obliquities (spin-orbit angles) of planet-hosting stars. The best measurements are for stars with short-period giant planets, which have been found on prograde, polar, and retrograde orbits. It seems likely that dynamical processes such as planet-planet scattering and secular perturbations are responsible for tilting the orbits of close-in giant planets, just as those processes are implicated in exciting orbital eccentricities. The observed dependence of the obliquity on orbital separation, planet mass, and stellar structure suggests that in some cases, tidal dissipation damps a star's obliquity within its main-sequence lifetime. The situation is not as clear for stars with smaller or wider-orbiting planets. Although the earliest measurements of such systems tended to find low obliquities, some glaring exceptions are now known in which the star's rotation is misaligned with respect to the coplanar orbits of multiple planets. In addition, statistical analyses based on projected rotation velocities and photometric variability have found a broad range of obliquities for F-type stars hosting compact multiple-planet systems. The results suggest it is unsafe to assume that stars and their protoplanetary disks are aligned. Primordial misalignments might be produced by neighboring stars or more complex events that occur during the epoch of planet formation.

A Tendency Toward Alignment in Single-star Warm-Jupiter Systems

“…However, further measurements are needed to verify the robustness of this final result. For example, Appendix C of Albrecht et al (2022) describes potential caveats to the |λ| measurements of the CoRoT-1 and CoRoT-19 systems. Excluding these, the significance of each result in Figure 4 is adjusted to 3.2σ, 4.0σ, and 2.4σ in the left, center, and right panels, respectively.…”

“…Because the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect is observed across individual transit events, the vast majority of stellar obliquity measurements to date have been made in systems with massive, close-orbiting planets due to the relatively short, frequent, and deep transits observed for these systems (see Albrecht et al (2022) for a review of existing constraints). However, planets orbiting at small orbital separation are heavily impacted by Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.…”

Evidence for the Late Arrival of Hot Jupiters in Systems with High Host-star Obliquities

“…We remove several systems from the sample due to possible systematic errors affecting their obliquity measurements (e.g., Appendix C of Albrecht et al 2022). We remove CoRoT-1 b because the two measurements of its obliquity are strongly discrepant, with one favoring an aligned configuration (Bouchy et al 2008) and one favoring a misaligned configuration (Pont 2009).…”

Evidence for the Late Arrival of Hot Jupiters in Systems with High Host-star Obliquities

“…We remove several systems from the sample due to possible systematic errors affecting their obliquity measurements (e.g., Appendix C of Albrecht et al 2022). We remove CoRoT-1 because the two measurements of its obliquity are strongly discrepant, with one favoring an aligned configuration (Bouchy et al 2008) and one favoring a misaligned configuration (Pont 2009).…”