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Looking For Jupiter-Class Planets Indicates Solar Systems Like Ours Are Rare (theconversation.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A high school senior from New York analyzed data for more than 1,100 stars and pinpointed the frequency of Jupiter analogs (planets with similar mass and orbital period to Jupiter) to 3%. He published his results in a paper for the Astrophysical Journal. The relative rarity of Jupiter-like planets indicates that true solar system analogs should themselves be rare. By extension, given the important role that Jupiter played at all stages of the formation of the solar system, Earth-like habitable planets with similar formation history to our solar system will be rare.
"Solar systems" like ours are rare indeed, because there is only one Solar System.
It's a proper noun.
The term the article was looking for was planetary system.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
That's if you are using the difference in light to detect the planets but there are other ways. If you use the wobble of the star caused by the pull of the gravity by the planet you don't have to wait for three rotations of the planet. It also allows you to examine star systems that have an orbital plane shared with Earth. If we look "down" on the system we would never see a planet move in front of the star but we would see the star move.
It's rather premature to declare all those systems devoid of planets when our primary means for detecting possible planets is when they pass between our planet and their star at the same time we observe them. Jupiter takes 12 years to make an orbit. As a simple logic problem, that means that we have to one opportunity to observe Jupiter passing between Sol and some sort of earth-analog in another system.... and that makes the HUGE assumption that that earth-analog is aligned with the solar system's orbital plane. If the earth analog happens to be staring down north-south on Sol, it isn't going to detect any planets.
There are a few other ways to detect planets, but those are special cases, again, very rare, and detecting very unique planets.
Detecting Sol-like systems is still extremely difficult.
Well unless the scientist working on this are total moron, you can quite easily do some statistic analysis to guess the number of Jupiter-like planet in other planetary system even with those complication . Here's a quick example. Let's suppose the world is in 2D and make every orbit are perfectly round to simplify things. A planet have a 360 orbit and let's say we can only see the planet for 0.01 (so 1/36000) of their orbit with 100% accuracy. So if you scan 72000 star and find 4 planets, you can then make the assumption that there's 2 gas planet per planetary system on average.
Am I missing something?
Elok