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.

Comments

Young Man Given Undue Credit; news at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

In a recent paper, Dominick Rowan, a high school senior from New York, and his coauthors (including astronomers from the University of Texas, the University of California at Santa Cruz and [me, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas)...

Look, it's great that this kid is involved, but quit lying about his contribution; when surrounded by such co-authors, even a monkey could have participated successfully.

Re:Young Man Given Undue Credit; news at 11

[gordo3000]

or maybe he actually did the grunt work of digging through the data and running the numbers?

who knows, but lots of undergrads and even grad students get their first publication by basically doing really pedestrian grunt work for fully independent scientists. Even famous scientists usually start out that way. Why should it be any different for this kid?

Call 'em solar systems. Analogy: The Moon

[dwheeler]

There is a moon that orbits the Earth that English speakers normally just call "the Moon" (note the capital letter for a proper noun). That doesn't mean there aren't other moons (obviously). If we need to give it a name, I'd suggest the Latin name (Luna), but most people don't use that terminology. Similarly, we are in "the Solar System", but I don't see a problem calling other systems "solar systems"; they just aren't THE solar system.