21.5 Exoplanets everywhere: what we are learning  (Page 2/6)

Kepler discoveries.

What a remarkable discovery it is that the most common types of planets in the Galaxy are completely absent from our solar system and were unknown until Kepler’s survey. However, recall that really small planets were difficult for the Kepler instruments to find. So, to estimate the frequency of Earth-size exoplanets, we need to correct for this sampling bias. The result is the corrected size distribution shown in [link] . Notice that in this graph, we have also taken the step of showing not the number of Kepler detections but the average number of planets per star for solar-type stars (spectral types F, G, and K).

Size distribution of planets for stars similar to the sun.

We see that the most common planet sizes of are those with radii from 1 to 3 times that of Earth—what we have called “Earths” and “super-Earths.” Each group occurs in about one-third to one-quarter of stars. In other words, if we group these sizes together, we can conclude there is nearly one such planet per star! And remember, this census includes primarily planets with orbital periods less than 2 years. We do not yet know how many undiscovered planets might exist at larger distances from their star.

To estimate the number of Earth-size planets in our Galaxy, we need to remember that there are approximately 100 billion stars of spectral types F, G, and K. Therefore, we estimate that there are about 30 billion Earth-size planets in our Galaxy. If we include the super-Earths too, then there could be one hundred billion in the whole Galaxy. This idea—that planets of roughly Earth’s size are so numerous—is surely one of the most important discoveries of modern astronomy.

Planets with known densities

For several hundred exoplanets, we have been able to measure both the size of the planet from transit data and its mass from Doppler data, yielding an estimate of its density. Comparing the average density of exoplanets to the density of planets in our solar system helps us understand whether they are rocky or gaseous in nature. This has been particularly important for understanding the structure of the new categories of super-Earths and mini-Neptunes with masses between 3–10 times the mass of Earth. A key observation so far is that planets that are more than 10 times the mass of Earth have substantial gaseous envelopes (like Uranus and Neptune) whereas lower-mass planets are predominately rocky in nature (like the terrestrial planets).