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A recent observational study suggests that the occurrence of hot Jupiters (Hjs) around solar type stars is correlated with stellar clustering. I present in this talk a new scenario for HJ formation, called "Flyby Induced High-e Migration", that may help explain this correlation. In this scenario, stellar flybys excite the eccentricity and inclination of an outer planet (or brown dwarf) at large distance (10-300 au), which then triggers high-e migration of an inner cold Jupiter (at a few au), through the combined effects of von Zeipel-Lidov-Kozai (ZLK) eccentricity oscillation and tidal dissipation. The analytic estimate for the HJ occurrence rate in this formation scenario can be derived using semi-analytical calculations of the effective ZLK migration window for the inclination, together with numerical simulations of stellar flybys. This "flyby induced high-e migration" could account for a significant fraction of the observed HJ population, although the result depends on several uncertain parameters, including the density and lifetime of birth stellar clusters, and the occurrence rate of the initial "cold Jupiter + outer planet" systems. I finally compare this scenario to alternative mechanisms that could link HJs with stellar clustering. This study is based on an accepted paper with Yubo Su and Dong Lai from Cornell University (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021arXiv210207898R/abstract).

On the Correlation between Hot Jupiters and Stellar Clustering