A hot-Jupiter progenitor on a super-eccentric retrograde orbit

Gupta, Arvind F.; Millholland, Sarah C.; Im, Haedam; Dong, Jiayin; Jackson, Jonathan M.; Carleo, Ilaria; Libby-Roberts, Jessica; Delamer, Megan; Giovinazzi, Mark R.; Lin, Andrea S. J.; Kanodia, Shubham; Wang, Xian-Yu; Stassun, Keivan; Masseron, Thomas; Dragomir, Diana; Mahadevan, Suvrath; Wright, Jason; Alvarado-Montes, Jaime A.; Bender, Chad; Blake, Cullen H.; Caldwell, Douglas; Cañas, Caleb I.; Cochran, William D.; Dalba, Paul; Everett, Mark E.; Fernandez, Pipa; Golub, Eli; Guillet, Bruno; Halverson, Samuel; Hebb, Leslie; Higuera, Jesus; Huang, Chelsea X.; Klusmeyer, Jessica; Knight, Rachel; Leroux, Liouba; Logsdon, Sarah E.; Loose, Margaret; McElwain, Michael W.; Monson, Andrew; Ninan, Joe P.; Nowak, Grzegorz; Palle, Enric; Patel, Yatrik; Pepper, Joshua; Primm, Michael; Rajagopal, Jayadev; Robertson, Paul; Roy, Arpita; Schneider, Donald P.; Schwab, Christian; Schweiker, Heidi; Sgro, Lauren; Shimizu, Masao; Simard, Georges; Stefánsson, Gudmundur; Stevens, Daniel J.; Villanueva, Steven; Wisniewski, John; Will, Stefan; Ziegler, Carl
Bibliographical reference

Nature

Advertised on:
8
2024
Journal
Number of authors
60
IAC number of authors
12
Citations
4
Refereed citations
1
Description
Giant exoplanets orbiting close to their host stars are unlikely to have formed in their present configurations1. These `hot Jupiter' planets are instead thought to have migrated inward from beyond the ice line and several viable migration channels have been proposed, including eccentricity excitation through angular-momentum exchange with a third body followed by tidally driven orbital circularization2,3. The discovery of the extremely eccentric (e = 0.93) giant exoplanet HD 80606 b (ref. 4) provided observational evidence that hot Jupiters may have formed through this high-eccentricity tidal-migration pathway5. However, no similar hot-Jupiter progenitors have been found and simulations predict that one factor affecting the efficacy of this mechanism is exoplanet mass, as low-mass planets are more likely to be tidally disrupted during periastron passage6-8. Here we present spectroscopic and photometric observations of TIC 241249530 b, a high-mass, transiting warm Jupiter with an extreme orbital eccentricity of e = 0.94. The orbit of TIC 241249530 b is consistent with a history of eccentricity oscillations and a future tidal circularization trajectory. Our analysis of the mass and eccentricity distributions of the transiting-warm-Jupiter population further reveals a correlation between high mass and high eccentricity.
Type