For example:
55 Cancri b: 0.7 days
Kepler-1649c: 19.5 days
Gliese 581g: 32 days
Compare it to Earth, which is 365 days and Mercury which is 88 days. What are the factors that cause these exoplanets revolve much faster?
In: 5
It’s something of a selection bias in how scientists detect extrasolar planets. When a planet passes in front of it’s star, it causes that star to dim ever so slightly. That dimming is what we’re looking for. It takes 3 of these dimming events in order to confirm a detection, so if you were an alien trying to detect Earth, it would take you at least 3 years. It would take you 90 years to confirm the detection of Saturn.
So obviously this method has a bias in favour of planets that orbit weirdly close to their parent star, because you can rack up 3 dimming events much more quickly. So it’s probably not that our solar system is weird in that it doesn’t have any planets super close to the sun, it’s just that our detection methods tend to find the ones that do.
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