Scientists discover super-Earth exoplanets are more common in the universe than we thought

> “Previously, there were only upper limits on the numbers of super-Earths [in wide orbits], and there was a suggestion that they might not exist at all,” Yee continued.

It’s always funny to me how astronomers make assumptions based on our absolutely insufficient current methods of observing exoplanets – only for those assumptions to get wrecked barely a few years later at most.

Maybe we should wait a few decades and few generations of telescopes before we make any serious hypotheses and models?

We are babies when it comes to exoplanet hunting, barely starting to crawl. Barely a few decades into it at most. And our telescopes are just barely good enough if they can observe some patch of the sky for longer periods of time. Which most of the time they can’t due to mission constraints or other projects on the timetable.

Not to mention, we have *so so many* false positives and below 5 sigma detections for anything smaller than Hot Jupiters. Like, the Kepler datasets.

Once you take away all those false positives and below 5 sigma sightings, do we really have a large enough sample to make grand declarations?

Consider the following: a ship with a half-blind crew sets out for an oceanographic journey. During their time, they observe many whales, orcas and what seems to be dolphins. When back home, they proudly declare these three to be the most common forms of marine life.

Are whales, orcas and dolphins the most common ocean lifeforms or… maybe the crew put out a rushed hypothesis based on completely insufficient observational methods? *Maybe whales, orcas and dolphins are all you can see when half-blind?*

I bet in the next 20 years it will turn out that *supposedly common* Super Earths and mini-Neptunes are rather rare compared to say, Mercury-likes. It’s just our exoplanet hunting methods and telescopes sucked back then and no one took that into account.

Would we not have been a super earth without the collision that formed the moon?