Testing the Tidal Heating Hypothesis for the Transiting Exoplanets HAT-P-1b and TrES-4b

Details Testing the Tidal Heating Hypothesis for the Transiting Exoplanets HAT-P-1b and TrES-4b Testing the Tidal Heating Hypothesis for the Transiting Exoplanets HAT-P-1b and TrES-4b

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21113409a&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #134.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.969

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

One of the most interesting results that has emerged from the detection and study of transiting exoplanets is that some Hot Jupiters have larger radii, and thus lower densities, than models predict. A few mechanisms have been suggested as the cause of this, including one hypothesis that there is an unknown source of internal heat inflating these planets. Such a source of heat could be the dissipation of energy arising from the ongoing tidal circularization of the planets' eccentric orbits. However, the tidal circularization timescale for such close in planets is predicted to be at least an order of magnitude shorter than the putative ages of the systems. Therefore, if an inflated Hot Jupiter's orbital eccentricity is truly non-zero, there must be a perturber - possibly an additional undiscovered planet - in the system to regularly excite its eccentricity. We are currently carrying out high cadence and high precision radial velocity measurements of the host stars to inflated Hot Jupiters with the
Hobby-Eberly-Telescope to constrain their orbital eccentricities, search for additional planets in the systems, and ultimately test the tidal heating hypothesis. We present here preliminary results for the systems HAT-P-1 and TrES-4. At the time of this writing, TrES-4b is by far the lowest density exoplanet and the most discrepant from theoretical models.
Support for this work was provided by NASA through grants GO-10103, GO-10610, and GO-10989 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA
contract NAS5-26555.

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