Reinflation of Warm and Hot Jupiters

Thaddeus D. Komacek, Daniel P. Thorngren, Eric D. Lopez, Sivan Ginzburg

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

Understanding the anomalous radii of many transiting hot gas-giant planets is a fundamental problem of planetary science. Recent detections of reinflated warm Jupiters orbiting post-main-sequence stars and the reinflation of hot Jupiters while their host stars evolve on the main sequence may help constrain models for the anomalous radii of hot Jupiters. In this work, we present evolution models studying the reinflation of gas giants to determine how varying the depth and intensity of deposited heating affects both main-sequence reinflation of hot Jupiters and post-main-sequence reinflation of warm Jupiters. We find that deeper heating is required to reinflate hot Jupiters than is needed to suppress their cooling, and that the timescale of reinflation decreases with increasing heating rate and depth. We find a strong degeneracy between heating rate and depth, with either strong shallow heating or weak deep heating providing an explanation for main-sequence reinflation of hot Jupiters. This degeneracy between heating rate and depth can be broken in the case of post-main-sequence reinflation of warm Jupiters, as the inflation must be rapid to occur within post-main-sequence evolution timescales. We also show that the dependence of heating rate on the incident stellar flux inferred from the sample of hot Jupiters can explain reinflation of both warm and hot Jupiters. TESS will obtain a large sample of warm Jupiters orbiting post-main-sequence stars, which will help to constrain the mechanism(s) causing the anomalous radii of gas-giant planets.

Original languageEnglish
Article number36
JournalAstrophysical Journal
Volume893
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 10 Apr 2020
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Reinflation of Warm and Hot Jupiters'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this