Evidence that the Occurrence Rate of Hot Jupiters around Sun-like Stars Decreases with Stellar Age

TL;DR

This study uses a hierarchical Bayesian approach to show that the occurrence rate of hot Jupiters around Sun-like stars decreases with stellar age, suggesting tidal orbital decay influences their longevity.

Contribution

Develops a Bayesian framework that accounts for uncertainties in stellar parameters to analyze hot Jupiter occurrence rates as a function of stellar age and other factors.

Findings

Hot Jupiters' occurrence rate decreases over Gyr timescales.

Cold Jupiters' occurrence rate remains constant with stellar age.

Implied stellar tidal quality factor is around 10^6.

Abstract

We investigate how the occurrence rate of giant planets (minimum mass $> 0.3\, M_\mathrm{Jup}$) around Sun-like stars depends on the age, mass, and metallicity of their host stars. We develop a hierarchical Bayesian framework to infer the number of planets per star (NPPS) as a function of both planetary and stellar parameters. The framework fully takes into account the uncertainties in the latter by utilizing the posterior samples for the stellar parameters obtained by fitting stellar isochrone models to the spectroscopic parameters, Gaia DR3 parallaxes, and 2MASS $K_{\rm s}$-band magnitudes adopting a certain bookkeeping prior. We apply the framework to 46 Doppler giants found around a sample of 382 Sun-like stars from the California Legacy Survey catalog that publishes spectroscopic parameters and search completeness for all the surveyed stars. We find evidence that the NPPS of hot Jupiters (orbital period $P=1$-$10\,\mathrm{days}$) decreases roughly in the latter half of the main sequence over the timescale of $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{Gyr})$, while that of cold Jupiters ($P=1$-$10\,\mathrm{yr}$) does not. Assuming that this decrease is real and caused by tidal orbital decay, the modified stellar tidal quality factor $Q^\prime_\star$ is implied to be $\mathcal{O}(10^6)$ for a Sun-like main-sequence star orbited by a Jupiter-mass planet with $P\approx 3\,\mathrm{days}$.