The Mystifying Case of the Missing Planets
After the sun formed, the dust and gas left over from its natal cloud slowly swirled into the eight planets we have today. Astronomers have used TESS to find hundreds of possible planets around the nearest stars since its launch in April 2018, including 24 confirmed worlds so far. The galaxy seems to host a lot of small planets, especially ones measuring between two and four times the size of Earth and others in Earth’s ballpark. While TESS doesn’t yet have enough planets in its statistics bin to confirm or disprove the Fulton gap, the trend has continued, and astronomers say they don’t expect the gap to disappear. In an April paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by Diana Dragomir, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works with TESS data, reported the discovery of a star system harboring two planets on either side of the gap, for instance.
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