"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.

Nevertheless, the fairly limited assertion that sub-Jupiter mass
planets exist in greater abundance is pretty well supported by 
the data on hand (with a few caveats).