Search for: All records

Recent advances in submillimeter observations of young circumstellar nebulae have opened an unprecedented window into the structure of protoplanetary disks that has revealed the surprising ubiquity of broken and misaligned disks. In this work, we demonstrate that such disks are capable of torquing the spin axis of their host star, representing a hitherto unexplored pathway by which stellar obliquities may be generated. The basis of this mechanism is a crossing of the stellar spin precession and inner disk regression frequencies, resulting in adiabatic excitation of the stellar obliquity. We derive analytical expressions for the characteristic frequencies of the inner disk and star as a function of the disk gap boundaries and place an approximate limit on the disk architectures for which frequency crossing and the resulting obliquity excitation are expected, thereby illustrating the efficacy of this model. Cumulatively, our results support the emerging consensus that significant spin–orbit misalignments are an expected outcome of planet formation.

We present time-series photometry during the early decline phase of the extremely fast nova V1674 Herculis. The 2021 light curve showed periodic signals at 0.152921(3) days and 501.486(5) s, which we interpret as respectively the orbital and white dwarf spin periods in the underlying binary. We also detected a sideband signal at the difference frequency between these two clocks. During the first 15 days of outburst, the spin period appears to have increased by 0.014(1)%. This increase probably arose from the sudden loss of high-angular-momentum gas (“the nova explosion”) from the rotating, magnetic white dwarf. Both periodic signals appeared remarkably early in the outburst, which we attribute to the extreme speed with which the nova evolved (and became transparent to radiation from the inner binary). After that very fast initial period increase of 71 ms, the period subsequently decreased—at 182(18) ms yr⁻¹in 2021, and 88(18) ms yr⁻¹in 2022. These rates are ∼100× faster than typically seen in intermediate polars. This could be due to high accretion torques from very high mass-transfer rates, which might be common when low-mass donor stars are strongly irradiated by a nova outburst.