Princeton University Extrasolar Planet Discussion Group

The origin of hot (and warm) Jupiters has been an open question since the beginning of the exoplanet era. These planets are unlikely to have formed on the orbits we currently observe and several migration theories have been proposed to explain them. One prominent theory is high-eccentricity migration, in which a Jupiter-sized planet is excited to very high eccentricity sometime after formation and tides raised in the planet by the central star shrink and circularize its orbit during close passages. In this talk, I will discuss various ways in which we have constrained the prevalence of this migration mechanism using numerical, analytical, and statistical techniques and report the findings of three recent papers on the subject. We find that high-eccentricity migration can account for at most half of observed hot Jupiters and show that current and near-future observations could strongly constrain the mechanism for warm Jupiters.