Exoplanetary Spin-Orbit Misalignment, and a Secular Resonance Encountered During Hot Jupiter Migration

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The angle between the stellar spin axis and the planetary orbit axis can be probed by the spectroscopic Rossiter-McLaughlin effect during planetary transits. Five systems have indicated misalignment; ten systems are consistent with alignment. The statistical analysis of Fabrycky & Winn (2009, ApJ, 696, 1230) is updated in the Table. A simple bimodal distribution of spin-orbit angles is favored over a simple unimodal distribution by a factor of 3 × 106. One possible interpretation is that (1) the majority of stellar spins and newborn planetary orbits are coplanar with their protoplanetary disks, so migration through that disk leads to spin-orbit alignment, and (2) a minority of hot Jupiters, though forming coplanar with the stellar equator, are later scattered or secularly torqued into misaligned, roughly isotropic, orbits.
In migration theories of the latter, a third body absorbs angular momentum and tidal dissipation removes energy. As the semi-major axis shrinks, the dominant precessional effect transfers from the third body to the stellar oblateness. The resulting secular resonance can excite a large spin-orbit misalignment, including slightly-retrograde polar orbits. In the case of Kozai cycles with tidal friction, the spin-orbit evolution of the archetypical case of HD 80606b can be framed as an adiabatic capture problem. The expected orbit-orbit inclination of 50° or 130° (which is unobservable) maps to final stellar obliquities of either 50° or 110°. Typically the prediction is less precise because tidal evolution is often faster than precession, yet two preferential obliquities still appear in population calculations (Fabrycky & Tremaine 2007, ApJ, 669, 1298; figure 10), which can be tested with better statistics of misaligned spin-orbit angles.

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