In infinite wisdom Rich answered:

In infinite wisdom Christopher M. Jones answered:

"Alfred A. Aburto Jr." <aburto@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message news:<M8crc.1840$9M.936@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com>...

"Rich" <someone@somewhere.com> wrote in message

news:40AA1FC7.3060604@somewhere.com...

Umm, the current one?  By the "current census," I mean the known
extrasolar planets.

Almost exclusively gas giants, only a few oddball terrestrial planets.
I don't see how you can derive that there are "more lower-mass planets
than Jupiter-mass planets" from the data at hand.

It is interesting though to see a plot of the trends ... the number of
extra-solar planets increases greatly as the planet mass decreases:

http://exoplanets.org/science.html

Wrong link, I think you want: http://exoplanets.org/msini.html

The data is suggestive, especially considering the sensitivity
limits of the instruments (which more easily detect more massive planets and cannot detect sub-gas-giant planets at all).
Other investigations, especially the Kepler mission, will give
us much better data on the abundance of lower mass planets.

I'm not at all sure that this simplistic statistical treatment is
valid. The dynamics of planet formation are far from know, and many
of the gas giants are in highly eccentric orbits, which would disrupt
the orbits of any other planets for quite a way in and out. And
it's not even known if terrestrial planets can form as outer
planets, as they would have to in a significant number of the
stars where a gas giant (or 2) has been detected.

Another thing that occurs to me is that most real-world distributions
tend to ba gaussian. One might reasonably expect planetary mass
distributions to be gaussian as well, rather than linear.

In fact, I see no reason to expect a linear distribution at all.
Perhaps you guys know more than I, if so please explain why you
would expect a linear distribution than a guassian.

When I get some time to look up some numbers, I'll check the solar
system and post the results.

Rich

Rich