Consequences of the Ejection and Disruption of Giant Planets

TL;DR

This paper uses hydrodynamical simulations to study how planet-planet scattering affects the fate of giant planets, revealing that many are ejected or destroyed, and that scattering influences stellar obliquity and planet migration histories.

Contribution

It demonstrates through simulations that close encounters often lead to planet ejection or destruction, and links scattering events to observed hot Jupiter properties and stellar obliquities.

Findings

Many hot Jupiters have scattering orbits within the ice line.

Planet ejection/destruction deposits significant angular momentum onto host stars.

High stellar obliquity (>90°) is common in systems with planet-planet scattering.

Abstract

The discovery of Jupiter-mass planets in close orbits about their parent stars has challenged models of planet formation. Recent observations have shown that a number of these planets have highly inclined, sometimes retrograde orbits about their parent stars, prompting much speculation as to their origin. It is known that migration alone cannot account for the observed population of these misaligned hot Jupiters, which suggests that dynamical processes after the gas disc dissipates play a substantial role in yielding the observed inclination and eccentricity distributions. One particularly promising candidate is planet-planet scattering, which is not very well understood in the non-linear regime of tides. Through three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of multi-orbit encounters, we show that planets that are scattered into an orbit about their parent stars with closest approach distance being less than approximately three times the tidal radius are either destroyed or completely ejected from the system. We find that as few as 5 and as many as 18 of the currently known hot Jupiters have a maximum initial apastron for scattering that lies well within the ice line, implying that these planets must have migrated either before or after the scattering event that brought them to their current positions. If stellar tides are unimportant $(Q_\ast \gtrsim 10^7)$, disk migration is required to explain the existence of the hot Jupiters present in these systems. Additionally, we find that the disruption and/or ejection of Jupiter-mass planets deposits a Sun's worth of angular momentum onto the host star. For systems in which planet-planet scattering is common, we predict that planetary hosts have up to a 35% chance of possessing an obliquity relative to the invariable plane of greater than 90 degrees.