Abstract

The birth and death of planets may be affected by mass outflows from their parent stars during the T-Tauri or post-main-sequence phases of stellar evolution. These outflows are often modeled to be isotropic, but this assumption is not realistic for fast rotators nor bipolar jets. Here we present relations for the time evolution of a single planet, brown dwarf, comet or asteroid perturbed by anisotropic mass loss in terms of a complete set of planetary orbital elements, the ejecta velocity, and the parent star's co-latitude and longitude. We consider (1) rapidly rotating giant stars, and (2) arbitrarily-directed jet outflows. We conclude that the isotropic mass-loss assumption can safely be used to model planetary motion during giant branch phases of stellar evolution within distances of hundreds of au. In fact, latitudinal mass loss variations anisotropically affect planetary motion only if the mass loss is asymmetric about the stellar equator. Also, we demonstrate how constant-velocity, asymmetric bipolar outflows in young systems incite orbital inclination changes. Consequently, this phenomenon readily tilts exoplanetary orbits external to a nascent disc on the order of degrees.

Presentation

Poster