Tidal dissipation in multi-planet systems and constraints to orbit-fitting

TL;DR

This paper develops a linear secular theory with tidal damping to analyze multi-planet systems, providing insights into their final states and applying it to constrain the orbit of HD10180 and the eccentricity of HD209458b.

Contribution

It introduces a general linear secular theory with tidal effects and applies it to specific exoplanet systems to refine orbital parameter estimates.

Findings

Tidal damping significantly influences planetary orbital evolution.

Eccentricity of HD209458b is likely much smaller than 0.01.

The theory recovers and extends previous results on planetary system dynamics.

Abstract

We present here in full details the linear secular theory with tidal damping that was used to constraint the fit of the HD10180 planetary system in (Lovis et al. 2011). The theory is very general and can provide some intuitive understanding of the final state of a planetary system when one or more planets are close to their central star. We globally recover the results of (Mardling 2007), but we show that in the HD209458 planetary system, the consideration of the tides raised by the central star on the planet lead to believe that the eccentricity of HD209458b is most probably much smaller than 0.01.