Signature of Planetary Mergers on Stellar Spins

Understand

One of the predictions of high eccentricity planetary migration is that many planets will end up plunging into their host stars.

• We investigate the consequence of planetary mergers on their stellar hosts' spin-period.
• Energy and angular momentum conservation yield that a planet consumption by a star will spin-up the star.
• We find that our calculations align with the observed bifurcation in the stellar spin-period in young clusters.