Followup on the Red Dwarf Planet Hunt

by | Nov 7, 2006 | Exoplanetary Science

Jacob Bean, lead author of the paper on red dwarfs discussed here yesterday, weighs in with additional useful information about the study. “The planet-metallicity connection has been firmly established for high-mass (Jupiter and super Jupiter) planets,” wrote Bean. “I believe there is not supposed to be a low-mass, including terrestrial, planet formation dependence on disk metallicity (except in the very extreme case of zero metal disks).” The upshot: pre-selecting M dwarfs for possible terrestrial planets still isn’t possible based on metallicity, though it may be predictive of gas giant worlds. The expanding dataset on M dwarf metallicity should eventually tell us more.

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