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Old 05-May-2007, 12:49 PM
folkhemmet folkhemmet is offline
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Nice website. However, the percentage reported in the how many exoplanets are there section in our galaxy is incorrect. It says that 7% of stars have gas giants with periods of ten years or less. Here is recent paper (astro-ph/0702213v1) written by Marcy et al which gives an updated percentage:

"Thirty planets have now emerged from the 260 target stars of the AAPS, suggesting that 10% of late F, G, and K field dwarfs have planets that can be detected with Doppler precisions of 3ms−1 and a time baseline of 8 years (a similar detection rate to that of the original 106 stars on the Lick Observatory survey which has yielded 13 planets to date; Fischer et al. 2003). These surveys are now beginning to explore planets in orbits beyond 4AU, though they remain insensitive to terrestrial mass planets beyond 0.1AU and neptune-
mass planets beyond 1AU. However, with planets being found orbiting more than 10% of nearby sun-like stars, it seems that planetary systems are common."

Also, microlensing searches are 90% confident that somewhere between 16-69% of galactic M-dwarfs have 10Me planets between 1.5 and 4 AU.

Thus, your website needs to update the 7% percentage for the fraction of stars with planets.
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