arrived

Screen-Shot-2013-08-10-at-12.16.14-PM

One prediction regarding exoplanets that did hold true was the Moore’s-Law like progression toward the detection of planets of ever-lower mass. More than seven years ago, not long after the discovery of Gliese 876 d, the plot of Msin(i) vs. year of discovery looked like this:

Screen-Shot-2013-08-10-at-10.58.00-AM

With a logarithmic scale for the y-axis, the lower envelope of masses adhered nicely to a straight line progression, pointing toward the discovery of the first Earth-mass exoplanet sometime shortly after 2010. The honors went, rather fittingly, last year, to Alpha Cen B b. Here’s an update to the above plot. Planets discovered via Doppler velocity only are indicated in gray, transiting planets are shown in red…

yr_mass

The data for the plot were parsed out of the very useful exoplanets.csv file published at exoplanets.org.

And wait, what’s going on with that point in 1993? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollux_b.

4 thoughts on “arrived

  1. And if you add the planets discovered by timing to the plot, the transit method has apparently finally caught up with the early 90s: PSR B1257+12A, meet Kepler-37b.

  2. Pingback: Wie heeft eigenlijk de eerste exoplaneet om een zonachtige ster ontdekt? – deel 2 | Astroblogs

  3. That’s some very loud pointing away from those little pink fellows at the bottom right. They don’t seem to be in your linked csv.

    Or am I missing something obvious?

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