3 ms·
> 6.2/+2.2/-1.3 Earth masses What is this telling me?
by vmception 5y ago
> 6.2/+2.2/-1.3 Earth masses
What is this telling me?
- civilized 5y agoThat looks like an asymmetric error bar, meaning the best estimate is 6.2 but could be 2.2 above or 1.3 below. Essentially it's a common physical scientist way of expressing a point estimate with a confidence interval. (In the life and social sciences they tend to just provide the point estimate and confidence interval explicitly.)
- legobmw99 5y agoSeems like an uneven error interval? Meaning if it’s not our estimated valid of 6.2, we have less confidence in the upper bound than the lower bound, or our estimates are distributed nonuniformly
- hoseja 5y agoWhich makes sense since physical quantities like this can't be negative and so can't be normally distributed.
- brysonreece 5y agoPlanet Nine (supposedly) has a mass somewhere between 4.9-8.4x that of our own planet.