Stellar Spin-Orbit Misalignment in a Multiplanet System

Daniel Huber, Joshua A. Carter, Mauro Barbieri, Andrea Miglio, Katherine M. Deck, Daniel C. Fabrycky, Benjamin T. Montet, Lars A. Buchhave, William J. Chaplin, Saskia Hekker, Josefina Montalban, Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda, Sarbani Basu, Timothy R. Bedding, Tiago L. Campante, J\orgen Christensen-Dalsgaard, Yvonne P. Elsworth, Dennis Stello, Torben Arentoft, Eric B. Ford, Ronald L. Gilliland, Rasmus Handberg, Andrew W. Howard, Howard Isaacson, John Asher Johnson, Christoffer Karoff, Steven D. Kawaler, Hans Kjeldsen, David W. Latham, Mikkel N. Lund, Mia Lundkvist, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Travis S. Metcalfe, Joshua N. Winn

(Submitted on 16 Oct 2013)

Stars hosting hot Jupiters are often observed to have high obliquities, whereas stars with multiple co-planar planets have been seen to have low obliquities. This has been interpreted as evidence that hot-Jupiter formation is linked to dynamical disruption, as opposed to planet migration through a protoplanetary disk. We used asteroseismology to measure a large obliquity for Kepler-56, a red giant star hosting two transiting co-planar planets. These observations show that spin-orbit misalignments are not confined to hot-Jupiter systems. Misalignments in a broader class of systems had been predicted as a consequence of torques from wide-orbiting companions, and indeed radial-velocity measurements revealed a third companion in a wide orbit in the Kepler-56 system.

Comments: Accepted for publication in Science, published online on October 17 2013; PDF includes main article and supplementary materials (65 pages, 27 figures, 7 tables)

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) DOI: 10.1126/science.1242066

Cite as: arXiv:1310.4503 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1310.4503v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)

Submission history From: Daniel Huber [v1] Wed, 16 Oct 2013 20:00:06 GMT (1956kb)