Hot Stars With Hot Jupiters Have High Obliquities

We show that stars with transiting planets for which the stellar obliquity is large are preferentially hot (T [subscript eff] > 6250 K). This could explain why small obliquities were observed in the earliest measurements, which focused on relatively cool stars drawn from Doppler surveys, as opposed to hotter stars that emerged more recently from transit surveys. The observed trend could be due to differences in planet formation and migration around stars of varying mass. Alternatively, we speculate that hot-Jupiter systems begin with a wide range of obliquities, but the photospheres of cool stars realign with the orbits due to tidal dissipation in their convective zones, while hot stars cannot realign because of their thinner convective zones. This in turn would suggest that hot Jupiters originate from few-body gravitational dynamics and that disk migration plays at most a supporting role.United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA Origins program through awardNNX09AD36G)Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Class of 1942)Beatrice M. Tinsley Scholars programUnited States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Michelson Fellowship)NWO of the Netherlands (Rubicon fellowship