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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.
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?