Protostars and Planets VI, Heidelberg, July 15-20, 2013
Poster 2H036
Open Clusters as Laboratories for Giant Planet Formation
Quinn, Samuel (Georgia State University, NSF Graduate Fellow)
White, Russel (Georgia State University)
Latham, David (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Abstract:
The primary process by which giant planets migrate inward is not known, but it can be constrained by the orbital properties of hot Jupiters in clusters with well established ages. Migration through a gas disk must occur within 10 Myr and is expected to produce circular orbits, while scattering through multi-body interactions may take hundreds of Myr and produce eccentric orbits before tidal circularization occurs. Motivated by this potential to inform migration theory, we initiated a radial-velocity search for planets in open clusters. Although our discovery of short-period giant planets in Praesepe (∼575 Myr) and now the Hyades (∼625 Myr) offer only weak constraints on the timescale of migration, the newly discovered Hyades planet has a non-zero eccentricity and a circularization timescale larger than the age of the cluster, which strongly suggests that in this case dynamical scattering has played a role. Further discoveries of planets in open clusters promise to contribute significantly to our understanding of the formation and subsequent dynamical evolution of planetary systems.
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