Investigating the Formation of Planets Interior to in situ Hot Jupiters

Abstract

The population of hot Jupiters with adjacent planetary companions is small but growing, and inner companions appear to be a nearly ubiquitous outcome within this subset of the exoplanet census. While most hot Jupiters are believed to form via tidal migration, the presence of adjacent companions is not easily explained by this formation mechanism, requiring consideration of additional formation mechanisms such as disk migration and in situ formation. In this work, we explore the possibility of in situ formation for both hot Jupiters and their interior companions. Using numerical simulations performed with the N-body integrator REBOUND, we investigate the growth of interior companions under various assumptions about disk conditions and hot Jupiter final orbital positions. Our results show that if a sufficiently high density of planetary embryos is transported to short orbital radii, it is feasible for both hot Jupiters and their interior companions to form in situ, providing a viable explanation for a subset of observed planetary architectures.