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