Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Planet flow versus low tidal friction in the star?

Are planets flowing into the star? I just got back from presenting my arguments at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Beijing, China. My poster was well received by those who came by, though we needed more people to go see the posters. So I will put up my poster here, now with all the design improvements thanks to Emily.
After I begun wondering last summer if the distribution of the shortest period Kepler planets was influenced by new planets coming in (which I presented twice in 2011), there was a paper by Socrates et al. (2011) promoting the idea of a flow of giant planets creating the three-day pile-up of "hot Jupiter" planets. I am now proposing that the origin of many of the shortest period planets is caused by this flow either "coming through" or "spilling out" of the three-day pileup. If so, then we do not need to invoke unexpectedly low friction to explain such close planets as WASP-18b. A flow of new planets from far might do it. Even though these closest planets have eccentricities close to zero now, they earlier must have had higher eccentricities, as part of the "high eccentricity migration" discussed by Socrates et al. (2011).