MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE Exoplanet size gap ARE EXOPLANETS SHRINKING WITH AGE?
ASTRONOMERS MAY BE CLOSER THAN EVER TO KNOWING WHY SUPER-EARTH EXOPLANETS ARE SO SCARCE Reported by David Crookes ©Tobias Roe tsch As we all know, planets come in many different sizes, and you only have to look at our Solar System to see how varied they can be. Just take Mercury as the smallest, for example, and Jupiter as the most humongous. If you had enough Mercurys at your disposal, you could take 24,462 of them and pack them tightly into Jupiter. For comparison, you could do the same with 1,300 Earths.
Interestingly, though, there is a size gap. Try as you may, you’re not going to find too many planets anywhere in the universe that are between 1.5…