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arXiv · 2609.20611

Coupled Orbital and Interior Evolution of Sub-Neptunes

Ritika Sethi·Sarah Millholland·Tim Hallatt
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Abstract

Recent observations have yielded the first measurements of young exoplanet demographics. Close-in sub-Neptune occurrence rates appear to rise from young ($10-100$ Myr) to intermediate (100 Myr $-$ 1 Gyr) ages and then decline sharply in the old ($\gtrsim 1$ Gyr) Kepler field population. In this paper, we test whether these observations can be explained by the effects of planetary cooling, atmospheric mass loss, and tidal orbital migration, which we model through a fully coupled evolution framework. The orbital evolution is assumed to operate exclusively through high-eccentricity migration, in effort to estimate the maximum possible contribution from this migration channel. In reality, only a subset of planetary systems are expected to undergo HEM. We find that high-eccentricity migration rapidly populates the close-in sub-Neptune bin, producing a sharp rise in occurrence within the first $\sim 15$ Myr. After this early phase, the occurrence evolves only weakly. While the modeled young to intermediate-age evolution is broadly consistent with the observed trend within the uncertainty limits, it does not support the idea of a sustained young-to-intermediate rise driven by tidal migration. It also fails to reproduce the sharp decline in occurrence seen from intermediate to old ages, motivating additional physics or formation channels to be included in future models.

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Ritika Sethi, Sarah Millholland, Tim Hallatt. 2026-09-17. Coupled Orbital and Interior Evolution of Sub-Neptunes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20611

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