It is funny to consider that most of the Milky Way is too dim to see. "Dark" matter. Of those 131 closest stars, only 22 are eye-visible. Only 6 are larger than

It is funny to consider that most of the Milky Way is too dim to see. "Dark" matter. Of those 131 closest stars, only 22 are eye-visible. Only 6 are larger than Sol! WISE 0855−0714 is a mere 7.4 light years away and wasn't discovered until we started putting infrared telescopes in orbit. Heck, TRAPPIST-1 itself isn't eye-visible. It's only slightly bigger than Jupiter! But these systems are hugely overrepresented in exoplanet surveys-- since we've only been hunting for exoplanets for a decade or so via the transit method, most of them have been found orbiting red dwarfs: the host star is so dim that transits take a big chunk out of their light curve, and the planets huddled up close to the star orbit so quickly that you can get the required three transits in a mere ten years of observation time. It's a safe bet that there are gas giants like Neptune out there, but by the transit method it would take four centuries to find them! We invented the "hot Jupiter" category after Kepler launched, without nothing that we won't ever find "normal" gas giants without interstellar probes or space telescopes 10 km across.