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Th eother day while surfing I found a list of the 120 detected extra-solar planets. (Minus the 2 super giants)
Just for the heck of it I decided to take this info and plot to a graph. I decided to plot planet mass against oribtal distance. The graph is attached.
I also plotted the respective positions of Jupiter and Saturn for comparison.
The graph is plotted on a log scale.
The first thing we note is that the densest grouping is for planets between about .8 to 3AU and with masses of 1 to 10 Jupiter masses. Jupiter seem to fall just on the fringe of this group.
Also smaller massed planets tend to be closer to their primary. Saturn seems to be the exception here, being one of the least massive and the furthest. ( but this may simply be because it might be harder to detect such planets and not be due to their rarity.
It will be interesting to see, as detection methods improve, whether or not the pattern of this graph more or less holds or whether a different pattern (or no pattern emerges.
Just for the heck of it I decided to take this info and plot to a graph. I decided to plot planet mass against oribtal distance. The graph is attached.
I also plotted the respective positions of Jupiter and Saturn for comparison.
The graph is plotted on a log scale.
The first thing we note is that the densest grouping is for planets between about .8 to 3AU and with masses of 1 to 10 Jupiter masses. Jupiter seem to fall just on the fringe of this group.
Also smaller massed planets tend to be closer to their primary. Saturn seems to be the exception here, being one of the least massive and the furthest. ( but this may simply be because it might be harder to detect such planets and not be due to their rarity.
It will be interesting to see, as detection methods improve, whether or not the pattern of this graph more or less holds or whether a different pattern (or no pattern emerges.