Exoplanets Beyond the Solar Neighbourhood: Galactic Tidal Perturbations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Galactic tidal forces influence the orbits of exoplanets across different regions of the Milky Way, revealing significant orbital perturbations especially for planets with certain orbital inclinations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed quantification of orbital changes induced by Galactic tides and estimates survival times and eccentricity variations for exoplanets based on their Galactic location and orbital alignment.

Findings

Maximum eccentricity growth occurs with severe orbital misalignment.

Galactic tides can cause eccentricity variations of several tenths.

Orbital perturbations occur on timescales of a few billion years.

Abstract

The majority of Milky Way extrasolar planets likely reside within a few kpc of the Galactic centre. The Galactic tidal forces acting on planets scale inversely with radius in the Galaxy and so are much greater in the inner Galaxy than in the Solar neighbourhood. Within a range of 3.5 to 10 kpc, the vertical tide from the Galactic disc is predominant. Interior to 3.5 kpc, the effects of the Galactic bulge cannot be neglected and the in-plane tidal components are as important as the vertical ones. Here, we quantify the orbital changes induced by these tides. We find that the greatest perturbations occur when the planetary orbit is severely misaligned to the parent star's orbit. When both planes are perpendicular, the eccentricity of the planet is driven to unity, although the semimajor axis is secularly unaffected. When both planes are coincident, the effect from Galactic tides is minimized, but remains non-zero. In these cases, we provide estimates for the survival times, as well as the minimum baseline eccentricity variation for all Milky Way exoplanets as a function of Galactic parameters. Inclinations similar to the Solar System's (about 60 degrees) can easily cause eccentric Neptunes (at about 30 AU) around host stars deep within the Galactic bulge (within 50 pc) to experience eccentricity variations of several tenths, and cause the exoplanets with the widest-known separations (at about 1000 AU) to experience similar variations in the Galactic disc. These variations occur on timescales of a few Gyr, a fraction of a typical main sequence lifetime.