  The exquisite photometry of Kepler has revealed reflected light from
exoplanets, tidal distortion of host stars and Doppler beaming of a star's
light due to its motion (Borucki 2016; Demory et al. 2012; Welsh et al. 2010;
Bloemen et al. 2012). Esteves et al. (2013, 2015) and Shporer et al. (2014)
reported additional odd harmonics in the light curves of two hot Jupiters:
HAT-P-7b and Kepler-13Ab. They measured non-zero power at three times the
orbital frequency that persisted while the planet was eclipsed and hence must
originate in the star (Esteves et al. 2015). Penoyre & Sandford (2018) showed
that orbital eccentricity could result in time-dependent tidal deformation of
the star that manifests itself at three times the orbital frequency and
suggested this could be the origin of the measured odd modes. In this Research
Note, we show that the small orbital eccentricities of HAT-P-7b and Kepler-13Ab
cannot generate the odd harmonics observed in these systems. Esteves et al.
(2015) hypothesized that the odd modes could be due to tidal distortion of the
star if its spin is misaligned with the system's orbital motion, as is the case
in both of these systems (Benomar et al. 2014; Herman et al. 2018), but this
mechanism has yet to be verified theoretically or numerically.
