A Quarter of Sun-Like Stars Host Earth-Size Worlds

The answer is that it's not much more difficult, but a lot more time consuming (gleaned from going to talks on the subject, not my area of expertise).

There are two basic ways that these planets are observed: They make the stars they orbit wobble (the basic 2 body problem - each body orbits the center of mass of the pair) and they dim the light from the star when they pass in front (like an eclipse).

The time problem comes from the fact that orbits are longer for objects more distant from the star. If we make the simplification that the orbit of the planet is basically circular, the time period for an orbit increases as radius^(3/2). (Insert semi-major axis for radius for non-circular). The standard is about three events separated by equal times to count as an observation - you have to wait to see an event at least twice to know the time period and so infer the radius of orbit, and once again to remove some flukes. Hence you're having to wait a long time looking at a star to see this happen.

Now, on top of that you've got the possibility that there's more than one planet, that the earth-like planet isn't the dominant mass, etc etc. This can all be cleverly dealt with (multiple wobbles, multiple eclipses) but it adds time to the confirmation process.

To give an example: Suppose you were somewhere near Proxima Centauri, and making the relevant observation looking for Earth. It would take at least three years to detect Earth, even if your telescope was amazing. Dynamics of the system would pick up the effect of Jupiter on the sun first, for the wobble detection (you wouldn't get much eclipse given the angle between the plane of the solar system and the position of PC) and it might take quite some analysis to pick up Earth at all given the effects of all the other planets.

Anyway, I'm sure some astro people can give a much better version of all this. Suffice to say that we aren't looking for Earth like planets at Earth like radii yet, but I imagine over the next ten to twenty years there will be a lot of poor graduate students analyzing data desperately looking for Gallifrey.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/aw4s1kbnGgM/story01.htm

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