Assembly of Protoplanetary Disks and Inclinations of Circumbinary Planets

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the mutual inclination between circumbinary planets and their host binary stars is influenced by disk assembly and gravitational interactions, suggesting close binaries tend to have aligned disks while wider binaries may be misaligned.

Contribution

The authors develop an analytic model of binary-disk alignment torque, explaining the observed alignment trends based on binary separation and accretion history.

Findings

Close binaries tend to have highly aligned disks and planets.

Wide binaries can have significantly misaligned disks.

Binary-disk inclination can decrease after accreting a few percent of the binary's mass.

Abstract

The Kepler satellite has discovered a number of transiting planets around close binary stars. These circumbinary systems have highly aligned planetary and binary orbits. In this paper, we explore how the mutual inclination between the planetary and binary orbits may reflect the physical conditions of the assembly of protoplanetary disks and the interaction between protostellar binaries and circumbinary disks. Given the turbulent nature of star-forming molecular clouds, it is possible that the gas falling onto the outer region of a circumbinary disk and the central protostellar binary have different axes of rotation. Thus, the newly assembled circumbinary disk can be misaligned with respect to the binary. However, the gravitational torque from the binary produces a warp and twist in the disk, and the back-reaction torque tends to align the disk and the binary orbital plane. We present a new, analytic calculation of this alignment torque, and show that the binary-disk inclination angle can be reduced appreciably after the binary accretes a few percent of its mass from the disk. Our calculation suggests that in the absence of other disturbances, circumbinary disks and planets around close (sub-AU) stellar binaries, for which mass accretion onto the proto-binary is very likely to have occurred, are expected to be highly aligned with the binary orbits, while disks and planets around wide binaries can be misaligned. Measurements of the mutual inclinations of circumbinary planetary systems can provide a clue to the birth environments of such systems.