ECCENTRICITY GROWTH AND ORBIT FLIP IN NEAR-COPLANAR HIERARCHICAL THREE-BODY SYSTEMS

By Gongjie Li, S. Naoz, B. Kocsis, Abraham Loeb. 2013

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The secular dynamical evolution of a hierarchical three-body system in which a distant third object orbits around a binary has been studied extensively, demonstrating that the inner orbit can undergo large eccentricity and inclination oscillations. It was shown before that starting with a circular inner orbit, large mutual inclination (40°–140°) can produce long timescale modulations that drive the eccentricity to extremely large values and can flip the orbit. Here, we demonstrate that starting with an almost coplanar configuration, for eccentric inner and outer orbits, the eccentricity of the inner orbit can still be excited to high values, and the orbit can flip by ∼180°, rolling over its major axis. The ∼180° flip criterion and the flip timescale are described by simple analytic expressions that depend on the initial orbital parameters. With tidal dissipation, this mechanism can produce counter-orbiting exoplanetary systems. In addition, we also show that this mechanism has the potential to enhance the tidal disruption or collision rates for different systems. Furthermore, we explore the entire e1 and i0 parameter space that can produce flips.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d9cf699c2356be94153327834c999a8fd148c08

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Fred C. Adams
2. K. Batygin
3. J. Becker
4. M. Brown
5. S. Naoz
6. R. Gomes
7. D. Nesvorný
8. R. Malhotra

Citations in the corpus

• The planet nine hypothesis (2019, background): “Importantly, this finding applies both to singly-transiting planets as well as to multitransiting systems wherein the planets themselves are almost exactly coplanar, but are cumulatively inclined with respect to the spin-axis of their host star (e.g., the inner planets of Kepler-56, Li et al. 2014; ”
• The Eccentric Kozai-Lidov Effect and Its Applications (2016, background): “Therefore an inclined planetary perturber can lead to short period oblique planets (Naoz et al. 2011; Li et al. 2014c).”