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Along the lines of this "detection bias," I've long wondered if there's another bias: the orbital angle of the exoplanets with respect to the plane of ours. If
by adminonymous 8y ago
Along the lines of this "detection bias," I've long wondered if there's another bias: the orbital angle of the exoplanets with respect to the plane of ours. If the detection is based on transit across the star of the system, what if we're looking at the axis of the planetary system, and not its equator? All systems similarly oriented toward our instruments would come up as a false negative, no?
(I'm not an astronomer, please correct my jargon).
- wlesieutre 8y agoYou're correct that most of our detection is by transits in front of stars and will only see planets with orbital planes aligned toward us. However, it's super cool to note that we've actually directly imaged expoplanets orbiting around their stars in other planes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exopla... Another possibility is detecting planets by the wobble that they introduce in the star's position. I'm not well read on the subject, but I wonder if Gaia's position measurements via parallax are accurate enough for this. EDIT: A bunch more information from Wikipedia on detection methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanet... The space-based observatory Gaia, launched in 2013, is expected to find thousands of planets via astrometry, but prior to the launch of Gaia, no planet detected by astrometry had been confirmed.