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ASuarezMascareno t1_j196gu0 wrote

Reply to comment by Gari_305 in Two Earth-mass exoplanets orbiting nearby star discovered by Gari_305

>I had to re-read the article and no shit this is you according to the citation

Yep, there are quite a few astronomers that are reddit users :) Once in a while *we* catch our own work being circulated around here.

I have to say I have yet to read Caroline Piaulet's paper. Just checked the press releases. I've been busy with end of the year stuff, and now I'm on holidays. I won't catch up to the newest results until I go back to work. However, I think I can give some answers.

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  1. I think everything we learn is pointing to a very big number of Earth like planets out there. I don't work in the statistics, so I'm not sure what is the current occurrence rate, but basically each time we improve instrumentation or analysis techniques, we just get more. There's also the fact that, in astronomy, there is usually more of the less massive stuff. More massive stuff requires more material and is harder to produce. It totally makes sense that there are more low mass stars than high mass stars, more big planets than low mass stars and more small planets than big planets.
  2. We (the community) are starting to get a reasonable number. With these two we are at 69 planets with masses < 2 Earth masses. We (my team) have a few published (also smaller than this one, like Proxima d) and some in which we are working. However, there are still very strong instrumental and analysis limitations. Most instruments have a hard time catching these small signals, and stellar activity makes it sometimes very difficult to recognize them. For GJ 1002 we hit kind of a sweetspot. We had a big telescope (VLT, 8m), an excellent instrument (ESPRESSO), low levels of stellar activity and a rotation signal that was very far away from the planetary signals (100 days for rotation, 10 and 21 for the planets).
  3. Hopefully we'll get closer to the actual Earth-twins (Earth mass in the habitable zone solar type stars)! This is a huge challenge for all the detection methods. We have the general idea of how to do it, but we haven't figured out the solution to many of the problems that we face in these cases.
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