Hierarchical Bayesian calibration of tidal orbit decay rates among hot Jupiters

Understand

Transiting hot Jupiters occupy a wedge-shaped region in the mass ratio-orbital separation diagram.

• Its upper boundary is eroded by tidal spiral-in of massive, close-in planets and is sensitive to the stellar tidal dissipation parameter $Q_s'$.
• We develop a simple generative model of the orbital separation distribution of the known population of transiting hot Jupiters, subject to tidal orbital decay, XUV-driven evaporation and observational selection bias.
• From the joint likelihood of the observed orbital separations of hot Jupiters discovered in ground-based wide-field transit surveys, measured with respect to the hyperparameters of the underlying population model, we recover narrow posterior probability distributions for $Q_s'$ in two different tidal forcing frequency regimes.