[Mars]

Why is it that aliens and, for some reason, religion have to be brought up every time exoplanets are discussed?

Truth of the matter is, they're almost definitely out there, and unless we or they develop FTL travel (which I'm skeptical about) we'll almost definitely never see them.

Can we please stop the bickering now and get back to the awsum astronomy? Herra can talk about physics of orbits or accretion or something and we can bring this thread back from the fail.

The only interests exoplanets have to everyday Joe are:

The possibility of people one day inhabiting them.
The possibility of aliens
In some cases what we can learn from the planets in terms of our own natural world.

[Flipside]

Must be pretty close to the star to have a 16.5 day year though, that things' going like the clappers, which is, as far as I'm aware, pretty rare for Gas Planets, which tend to form further out?

Migrated in due to not entirely stable orbit, extrasolar capture.

Aha! That would explain why they are pretty rare.

[General Battuta]

Must be pretty close to the star to have a 16.5 day year though, that things' going like the clappers, which is, as far as I'm aware, pretty rare for Gas Planets, which tend to form further out?

Migrated in due to not entirely stable orbit, extrasolar capture.

Aha! That would explain why they are pretty rare.

But they're not! At all!

[Flipside]

Meh, I haven't been keeping up with my Exoplanetary studies, so I don't know

[General Battuta]

They may be pretty rare in the universe, but they're very common in the planets we've discovered so far because they're really easy to spot with the wobble method.

[swashmebuckle]

They may be pretty rare in the universe, but...they're really easy to spot with the wobble method.

That's what she..oh nevermind, it's too much of a stretch.

(!)

[watsisname]

They may be pretty rare in the universe, but they're very common in the planets we've discovered so far because they're really easy to spot with the wobble method.

Yep.  The 'wobble' method has a selection bias for large planets with short orbital periods, hence all the hot jupiter's being discovered.  The transit method suffers from this bias as well, but not nearly as severe with regard to planet size.  The third option is direct imaging, which selects for planets with longer orbital periods (thus having larger angular separation from their star).  Unfortunately though, direct imaging is really friggin hard to do and I'm only aware of a handful of discoveries being made this way.

The latest data from Kepler (transit method) shows that planets Neptune-sized and smaller make up the majority of detections, and indeed the frequency of planets appears to decrease with increasing planet size, following the function of 1/R².  But most of these detections have rather short orbital periods, as expected from the method being used.

[Wobble73]

Hey!!!! It's not my method at all!!!