The orbital decay of a retrograde planet in a protoplanetary disk
Jeffrey Fung, University of Toronto
Advisor: Clement Baruteau, UCSC
Abstract: Motivated by recent observations of retrograde planets, we investigated the orbital decay of a retrograde planet embedded in a protoplanetary disk. We treated both gravitational and hydrodynamic drag, and found the migration time scale ranges from 10
3 to 10
5 years for planet masses between 10
-3 to 10
1 Jupiter masses. We also found that a highly inclined orbit can increase this time scale by a factor of 10 and that due to inclination damping, the final inclination is unlikely to be greater than 50 degrees.
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