Simulating the Effects of Outer Giant Planets on Inner Super-Earths with In Situ Formation Models

Systems that host outer giant planets are commonly accompanied by inner super-Earths (Zhu & Wu 2018, AJ, Volume 156, Issue 3, article id. 92; Rosenthal et al. 2022, AJ Supplement Series, Volume 262, Issue 1, article id.1). Planetary systems with this architecture tend to be more co-planar and if the outer giant planets have low mutual inclinations with respect to their inner system, the systems have higher transit multiplicities. This also implies that misaligned outer giants could perturb inner systems leading to lower transit multiplicities (Masuda et al. 2020, AJ, Volume 159, Issue 2, article id. 38). These findings could also help to explain the observed Kepler dichotomy, where we see an excess of singly transiting systems (Mustill et al. 2017, MNRAS, Volume 468, Issue 3). We investigate some of these observational trends using n-body simulations of in situ planet formation with inserted outer giant planets in two different configurations-the co-planar Solar System giants and a set of three unstable giant planets.