So what's causing this trend towards smaller, slower stars? For a telescope in our solar system to see an exoplanet in transit, the planet's orbit must be line

So what's causing this trend towards smaller, slower stars? For a telescope in our solar system to see an exoplanet in transit, the planet's orbit must be lined up edgewise to us. "The probability for an orbit to be properly aligned is equal to the diameter of the star divided by the diameter of the orbit," a spokesperson for Nasa, explains. ... Kepler's looking at thousands of stars, but because big planets are more likely to be found, they're going to come up early in the data. They didn't get that quite right. While it's true that the transit probability is greater for large planets and that we'll find more of them, that doesn't explain a fractional increase in planets far from the star with time. It's simpler. Planets far from the star take longer to go around. To confirm a transit and calculate the period, you need at least two, so the experiment must have gone on long enough for the planet to go around at least once. The long-periodicity planets are just beginning to show up because of this.