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Title:
Warm Saturns: On the Nature of Rings around Extrasolar Planets That Reside inside the Ice Line
Authors:
Schlichting, Hilke E.; Chang, Philip
Affiliation:
AA(Department of Earth and Space Science, University of California, Los Angeles, 595 Charles E. Young Drive East, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; California Institute of Technology, MC 130-33, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA; Hubble Fellow; ), AB(Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, 60 St George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3H8, Canada )
Publication:
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 734, Issue 2, article id. 117, 6 pp. (2011). (ApJ Homepage)
Publication Date:
06/2011
Origin:
IOP
Astronomy Keywords:
planets and satellites: detection, planets and satellites: general, planets and satellites: rings
DOI:
10.1088/0004-637X/734/2/117
Bibliographic Code:
2011ApJ...734..117S

Abstract

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 radius 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 108 yr 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 106 to a few times 109 yr. 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 particularly exciting, since a planet's J 2 reveals information about its interior structure. Furthermore, measurements of an exoplanet's J 2 from warped rings and of its oblateness 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 semimajor axes ~0.1 AU and larger.
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