2025ApJ...994L..23D

Sub-Saturns have been reported to preferentially occupy near-polar orbits, but this conclusion has so far been based primarily on systems with cool host stars; obliquity measurements for sub-Saturns orbiting hot stars remain scarce. Expanding the census into the hot-star regime is essential to test whether the polar preference persists across the Kraft break and to diagnose the underlying excitation mechanisms. In this work, we present Rossiter-McLaughlin observations of TOI-1135b, a sub-Saturn orbiting a hot star with T_eff = 6320 ± 120 K, using WIYN/NEID. We confirm its near-polar architecture, measuring a sky-projected obliquity of λ = $-68\mathop{.}\limits^{^\circ }{1}_{-5.3}^{+7.5}$, and a true obliquity of ψ = $72\mathop{.}\limits^{^\circ }{2}_{-6.6}^{+6.4}$. Coupling our new measurement with stellar-obliquity data from the literature, we find that sub-Saturns and hot Jupiters around cool stars are unlikely to be drawn from the same parent distribution at the 5.2σ level, consistent with weaker tidal realignment for lower-mass planets. Of the two known misaligned sub-Saturns around hot stars, both are near-polar, suggesting that the polar preference may extend above the Kraft break. Moreover, their obliquities lie near ∼65°, supporting predictions from secular resonance crossing for sub-Saturns around rapidly rotating hot stars.