"Chaotic Tides and Hot Jupiter Formation"

Abstract: Many hot Jupiters (HJs) have been observed to have large obliquities or misalignments between the stellar spin axis and the orbital angular momentum of the planet. This observation hints that at least a portion of HJs formed through high-eccentricity migration, in which a cold Jupiter is excited onto a highly eccentric orbit that circularizes over time due to tidal dissipation in the planet. Previous studies of high-e migration have use parameterized treatments of weak tidal friction and overlooked critical contributions from dynamical tides. For sufficiently large eccentricity and small pericenter distance, tidally excited modes in the planet can grow chaotically over multiple pericenter passages and eventually dissipate non-linearly, drawing energy from the orbit and rapidly shrinking the semimajor axis. I will discuss how giant planets can survive chaotic tidal heating and how this effect sculpts the period and obliquity distributions of HJ systems that form via high-eccentricity migration.