Re:As Planet Discoveries Pile Up, a Gap Appears in the Pattern
by lucb1e on Friday May 17, 2019 @09:36AM
(#19939444)
For those who don't know (I don't think it's a common unit): 1 AU is the distance between the earth and the sun (Astronomical Unit). So apparently [citation needed] we're blind for earth-sized planets at an earth's distance from its star.
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Re:As Planet Discoveries Pile Up, a Gap Appears in the Pattern
by petschge on Friday May 17, 2019 @10:19AM
(#19939831)
I am not a planetary scientist (my office mate is) and didn't spend much time looking at the literature. "A Revised Exoplanet Yield from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)" by Barclay et al. (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4365/aae3e9) might be the citation you are looking for. Figure 14 shows that anything below 1.5 Earth radii is basically invisible to TESS. I can not find a good chart for the detection limit in the planet size vs star distance plane.