Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Go back to class, Lokesh

Lokesh Mishra comments upon a paper he helped write. This collects findings based on the M and K stars with planets lucky-enough to transit against us. A Nature Astronomy article also exists, "Finding order in planetary architectures"; but doi 10.1038/s41550-023-01895-0 is paywalled.

Mishra says: About eight out of ten planetary systems around stars visible in the night sky have a "similar" architecture. Those are the series of super-Earth hot planets we've seen around stars not visible in the night sky, sans 'scope. The stars visible to most of us in semiurban North America are gas giants probably too young to have planets, or else are about to explode and destroy their planets. So - I wish he hadn't said that.

Our system is "ordered". This is - supposedly - rare. But we haven't been able to see Venus/Earth sized planets out at a 365 day period around a G star. We might not ever get to see these. It's difficult enough to spot a Jovian at 5 AU out; that's after many years of observation.

I'd like to see a few more constraints and a lot less hype, in sum. Phys.org, in its turn, should consider asking these questions of the Helvetian press-releases rather than just palming the whole content upon the rest of the Internet.

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