Planet--Planet Secular Migration Predicts a Stellar Obliquity--Period Anti-Correlation

Abstract: Stellar obliquities provide a fossil record of hot Jupiter (HJ) migration. An emerging observational trend in single-star systems is that strongly misaligned HJs are largely confined to short orbital periods, while longer-period HJs are preferentially aligned. This pattern cannot be explained by tidal dissipation in the star and may instead preserve clues to the migration pathway. We show that secular high-eccentricity migration driven by a distant planetary companion naturally produces such an obliquity--period correlation. In our simulations, the shortest-period HJs tend to be produced by the von Zeipel--Lidov--Kozai mechanism driven by highly inclined companions, which results in a broad range of final stellar obliquities. The longest-period HJs, on the other hand, are produced over longer timescales by coplanar high-eccentricity migration, which preserves low obliquities. The transition between these two limits is not abrupt, with intermediate-period HJs displaying a moderate range of obliquities. According to this interpretation, we predict that the shortest-period HJs should have distant planetary companions with broadly distributed mutual inclinations, whereas the companions of longer-period HJs should reside in nearly coplanar orbits. Upcoming Gaia astrometric constraints will provide a key test of this picture.