Paper detail

Successive common envelope events from multiple planets

Many stars harbour multi-planet systems. As these stars expand late in their evolutions, the innermost planet may be engulfed, leading to a common envelope (CE) event. Even if this is insufficient to eject the envelope, it may expand the star further, causing additional CE events, with the last one unbinding what remains of the envelope. This multi-planet CE scenario may have broad implications for stellar and planetary evolution across a range of systems. We develop a simplified version and show that it may be able to explain the recently observed planet WD 1856 b.