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arXiv 1104.3863astro-ph.EP
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温暖的土星:关于居住在冰线内的太阳系外行星环的性质

Warm Saturns: On the Nature of Rings around Extrasolar Planets that Reside Inside the Ice Line

Hilke E. Schlichting, Philip Chang

摘要:

我们讨论了可能存在于太阳系外行星周围的光环的性质。根据太阳系中气体巨星周围环的一般性质,我们推断出位于冰线内的系外行星周围环的可能性质。由于它们靠近它们的主恒星,围绕这些系外行星的环必须主要由岩石材料组成。然而,我们发现,尽管与冰相比,岩石的密度更高,但大多数观测到的太阳系外行星具有可靠的半径测量,具有足够大的罗氏半径来支持环。对于目前已知的凌日系外行星,坡印廷-罗伯逊阻力在$10^8$年的时间跨度内不会显著改变单个环粒子的动力学,只要它们的尺寸超过1 m。此外,我们表明,显着较小的环粒子可以存在于光学厚环,我们发现典型的环寿命范围从几倍$10^6$到几倍$10^9$年。最有趣的是,我们发现许多环可能具有非平凡的拉普拉斯平面,这是由于系外行星靠近其宿主恒星而导致的轨道四极效应增加,从而限制了环观测中太阳系外行星的$J_2$。这是特别令人兴奋的,因为行星的$J_2$揭示了其内部结构的信息。此外,从扭曲的环测量系外行星的扁率和它的$J_2$,将共同限制它的自转周期。根据我们已经推导出的太阳系外行星环的约束条件,我们预计,环探测的最佳候选者将来自开普勒航天器对半长轴为$\sim 0.1$ AU或更大的太阳系外行星的过境观测。

英文摘要:

We discuss the nature of rings that may exist around extrasolar planets. Taking the general properties of rings around the gas giants in the Solar System, we infer the likely properties of rings around exoplanets that reside inside the ice line. Due to their proximity to their host star, rings around such exoplanets must primarily consist of rocky materials. However, we find that despite the higher densities of rock compared to ice, most of the observed extrasolar planets with reliable radii measurements have sufficiently large Roche radii to support rings. For the currently known transiting extrasolar planets, Poynting-Robertson drag is not effective in significantly altering the dynamics of individual ring particles over a time span of $10^8$ years provided that they exceed about 1 m in size. In addition, we show that significantly smaller ring particles can exist in optically thick rings, for which we find typical ring lifetimes ranging from a few times $10^6$ to a few times $10^9$ years. Most interestingly, we find that many of the rings could have nontrivial Laplacian planes due to the increased effects of the orbital quadrupole caused by the exoplanets' proximity to their host star, allowing a constraint on the $J_2$ of extrasolar planets from ring observations. This is particular exciting, since a planet's $J_2$ reveals information about its interior structure. Furthermore, measurements of an exoplanet's oblateness and of its $J_2$, from warped rings, would together place limits on its spin period. Based on the constraints that we have derived for extrasolar rings, we anticipate that the best candidates for ring detections will come from transit observations by the Kepler spacecraft of extrasolar planets with semi-major axes $\sim 0.1$ AU and larger.

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