  The distribution of eccentricities e of extra-solar planets with semi-major
axes a > 0.2 AU is very uniform, and values for e are relatively large,
averaging 0.3 and broadly distributed up to near 1. For a < 0.2 AU,
eccentricities are much smaller (most e < 0.2), a characteristic widely
attributed to damping by tides after the planets formed and the protoplanetary
gas disk dissipated. Most previous estimates of the tidal damping considered
the tides raised on the planets, but ignored the tides raised on the stars.
Most also assumed specific values for the planets' poorly constrained tidal
dissipation parameter Qp. Perhaps most important, in many studies, the strongly
coupled evolution between e and a was ignored. We have now integrated the
coupled tidal evolution equations for e and a over the estimated age of each
planet, and confirmed that the distribution of initial e values of close-in
planets matches that of the general population for reasonable Q values, with
the best fits for stellar and planetary Q being ~10^5.5 and ~10^6.5,
respectively. The accompanying evolution of a values shows most close-in
planets had significantly larger a at the start of tidal migration. The earlier
gas disk migration did not bring all planets to their current orbits. The
current small values of a were only reached gradually due to tides over the
lifetimes of the planets. These results may have important implications for
planet formation models, atmospheric models of "hot Jupiters", and the success
of transit surveys.
