Assembly of Protoplanetary Disks and Inclinations of Circumbinary Planets

Understand

The Kepler satellite has discovered a number of transiting planets around close binary stars.

• These circumbinary systems have highly aligned planetary and binary orbits.
• In this paper, we explore how the mutual inclination between the planetary and binary orbits may reflect the physical conditions of the assembly of protoplanetary disks and the interaction between protostellar binaries and circumbinary disks.
• Given the turbulent nature of star-forming molecular clouds, it is possible that the gas falling onto the outer region of a circumbinary disk and the central protostellar binary have different axes of rotation.