Statistical Analysis of the Dearth of Super-eccentric Jupiters in the Kepler Sample

Abstract

Abstract Hot Jupiters may have formed in situ, or been delivered to their observed short periods through one of two categories of migration mechanisms: disk migration or high-eccentricity migration. If hot Jupiters were delivered by high-eccentricity migration, we would expect to observe some “super-eccentric” Jupiters in the process of migrating. We update a prediction for the number of super-eccentric Jupiters we would expect to observe in the Kepler sample if all hot Jupiters migrated through high-eccentricity migration and estimate the true number observed by Kepler. We find that the observations fail to match the prediction from high-eccentricity migration with 94.3% confidence and show that high-eccentricity migration can account for at most ∼62% of the hot Jupiters discovered by Kepler.