Tuesday, 26 July 2011

gas giants - Types of Exoplanets

Any statement about the relative frequencies of exoplanets of different size, is limited to the parameter space over which they can detected.



I'll add a reference shortly, but I recall the that a recent analysis of the Kepler-discovered exoplanets, that takes account of observational selection biases, indicates that for planets orbiting with periods less than about 100 days, that Neptune-sized objects are more common than Earth-sized objects, which are in turn more common than Jupiter-sized objects.



Extending this comparison outside this range of orbital periods is not possible with present data.

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