Tidal Dissipation in Planet-Hosting Stars: Damping of Spin-Orbit Misalignment and Survival of Hot Jupiters

TL;DR

This paper explains how tidal dissipation in stars can align stellar spins with planetary orbits without causing the planets to spiral into the star, reconciling observations of hot Jupiters' survival and their spin-orbit misalignments.

Contribution

It introduces a theory showing inertial wave dissipation in stars can dampen obliquity without significant orbital decay, resolving previous contradictions.

Findings

Inertial waves can efficiently damp stellar obliquity in misaligned systems.

Aligned systems do not excite inertial waves, reducing tidal dissipation.

Effective tidal Q for obliquity damping can be much lower than for orbital decay.

Abstract

Observations of hot Jupiters around solar-type stars with very short orbital periods (~day) suggest that tidal dissipation in such stars is not too efficient so that these planets can survive against rapid orbital decay. This is consistent with recent theoretical works, which indicate that the tidal Q of planet-hosting stars can indeed be much larger than the values inferred from stellar binaries. On the other hand, recent measurements of Rossiter-McLaughlin effects in transiting hot Jupiter systems not only reveal that many such systems have misaligned stellar spin with respect to the orbital axis, but also show that systems with cooler host stars tend to have aligned spin and orbital axes. Winn et al. suggested that this obliquity - temperature correlation may be explained by efficient damping of stellar obliquity due to tidal dissipation in the star. This explanation, however, is in apparent contradiction with the survival of these short-period hot Jupiters. We show that in the solar-type parent stars of close-in exoplanetary systems, the effective tidal Q governing the damping of stellar obliquity can be much smaller than that governing orbital decay. This is because for misaligned systems, the tidal potential contains a Fourier component with frequency equal to the stellar spin frequency (in the rotating frame of the star). This component can excite inertial waves in the convective envelope of the star, and the dissipation of inertial waves then leads to a spin-orbit alignment torque, but not orbital decay. By contrast, for aligned systems, such inertial wave excitation is forbidden since the tidal forcing frequency is much larger than the stellar spin frequency. We derive a general effective tidal evolution theory for misaligned binaries, taking account of different tidal responses and dissipation rates for different tidal forcing components.