Twenty years of giant exoplanets - Proceedings of the Haute Provence Observatory Colloquium, 5-9 October 2015 Edited by I. Boisse, O. Demangeon, F. Bouchy & L. Arnold
Giant Planets in Open Clusters
S.N. Quinn1,3, R.J. White1, D.W. Latham2 Talk given at OHP-2015 Colloquium
1Department of Physics & Astronomy, Georgia State University, 25 Park Place NE Suite 605, Atlanta, GA 30316,
USA (quinn@astro.gsu.edu)
2Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA 3National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow
Abstract Two decades after the discovery of 51 Peg b, more than 200 hot Jupiters have now been con- firmed, but the details of their inward migration remain uncertain. While it is widely accepted that short period giant planets could not have formed in situ, several different mechanisms (e.g., Type II migration, planet-planet scattering, Kozai-Lidov cycles) may contribute to shrinking planetary or- bits, and the relative importance of each is not well-constrained. Migration through the gas disk is expected to preserve circular, coplanar orbits and must occur quickly (within ∼10 Myr), whereas multi-body processes should initially excite eccentricities and inclinations and may take hundreds
- f millions of years. Subsequent evolution of the system (e.g., orbital circularization and inclina-
tion damping via tidal interaction with the host star) may obscure these differences, so observing hot Jupiters soon after migration occurs can constrain the importance of each mechanism. Fortunately, the well-characterized stars in young and adolescent open clusters (with known ages and composi- tions) provide natural laboratories for such studies, and recent surveys have begun to take advantage
- f this opportunity. We present a review of the discoveries in this emerging realm of exoplanet sci-
ence, discuss the constraints they provide for giant planet formation and migration, and reflect on the future direction of the field.
1 Introduction
Open clusters have long provided key observational constraints in the field of stellar astrophysics due to their unique
- properties. Having formed at the same time (and the same distance), the ensemble properties of the stars in clusters
allow one to determine their ages more precisely than is possible for typical field stars. Moreover, because they formed from the same cloud, the stars in a cluster have approximately the same metal abundance, so differences between stars within a cluster arise primarily as a function of stellar mass. As a result, open clusters enable direct
- bservation of billions of years of stellar evolution (e.g., structure, rotation, activity) across a range of stellar mass.
This allows us to conduct astrophysical experiments under conditions controlled for age, mass, composition, and even a known dynamical environment — such as stellar binary fraction and space density. With the discoveries of thousands of exoplanets over the past two decades1 in a wide range of environments — including hot Jupiters, planets orbiting early-type stars, M dwarfs, giant stars, white dwarfs, in binary systems, and even circumbinary planets — it has become clear that planets are an expected byproduct of star formation. Given that planets are common (e.g., Fressin et al. 2013; Mayor et al. 2011) and most stars form in a clustered environment (e.g., Lada & Lada 2003; Bressert et al. 2010), it is reasonable to expect that planets exist in open
- clusters. This is an exciting prospect, because that means we can begin to use clusters to study planetary evolution
in much the same way that they have been used to study stellar evolution. Planets found in clusters will immediately be among those with the best determined ages, and because open clusters dissipate into the field over time, they tend to be younger than field stars — many have ages < 1 Gyr. It is particularly interesting to note that these ages are similar to the expected timescales for many of the drastic changes that can occur in planetary systems — e.g.,
1http://www.exoplanets.org