Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Orbital Misalignment Of The Neptune-Mass Exoplanet Gj 436b With The Spin Of Its Cool Star, Vincent Bourrier, Christophe Lovis, Hervé Beust, David Ehrenreich, Gregory W. Henry, Nicola Astudillo-Defru, Romain Allart, Xavier Bonfils, Damien Ségransan, Xavier Delfosse, Heather M. Cegla, Aurélien Wyttenbach, Kevin Heng, Baptiste Lavie, Francesco Pepe

Information Systems and Engineering Management Research Publications

The angle between the spin of a star and the orbital planes of its planets traces the history of the planetary system. Exoplanets orbiting close to cool stars are expected to be on circular, aligned orbits because of strong tidal interactions with the stellar convective envelope. Spin–orbit alignment can be measured when the planet transits its star, but such ground-based spectroscopic measurements are challenging for cool, slowly rotating stars. Here we report the three-dimensional characterization of the trajectory of an exoplanet around an M dwarf star, derived by mapping the spectrum of the stellar photosphere along the chord transited by …