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The Spin-Orbit Misalignment of the XO-3 Exoplanetary System 1
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Winn, Joshua N. Johnson, John Asher Fabrycky, Daniel Clark Howard, Andrew W. Marcy, Geoffrey W. Narita, Norio Crossfield, Ian J. M. Suto, Yasushi Turner, Edwin Lewis Esquerdo, Gil Holman, M. J. |
| Copyright Year | 2009 |
| Abstract | We present photometric and spectroscopic observations of the 2009 Feb. 2 transit of the exoplanet XO-3b. The new data show conclusively that the planetary orbital axis and stellar rotation axis are misaligned. We thereby confirm the previous finding by Hébrard and coworkers, although we find a significantly smaller angle (37.3 ± 3.7 deg) between the sky projections of the two axes. XO-3b is the first exoplanet known to have a highly inclined orbit relative to the equatorial plane of its parent star, and as such it may fulfill the predictions of some scenarios for the migration of massive planets into close-in orbits. We revisit the statistical analysis of spin-orbit alignment in hot-Jupiter systems. Assuming the stellar obliquities to be drawn from a Rayleigh distribution, we find the mode of the distribution to be 13 −2 deg. It remains the case that a model representing two different migration channels—in which some planets are drawn from a perfectly-aligned distribution and the rest are drawn from an isotropic distribution—is favored over a single Rayleigh distribution, but with reduced significance. Subject headings: planetary systems — planetary systems: formation — stars: individual (XO-3, GSC 03727-01064) — stars: rotation Data presented herein were obtained at the W.M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. Department of Physics, and Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822; NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Department of Astronomy, University of California, Mail Code 3411, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Tokyo, Japan, Osawa, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588, Japan Department of Astronomy, University of California, 430 Portola Plaza, Box 951547, Los Angeles, CA Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan Princeton University Observatory, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa 277-8568, Japan |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://arxiv.org/pdf/0902.3461v1.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
