David Kipping

So that was already unusual.

I don't think people realize that Jupiter-like planets are quite rare in the universe.

Certainly mini-Neptunes and Neptunes are extremely common, but Jupiters, only about 10% of Sun-like stars have Jupiters around them, as far as we can tell.

When you say Jupiter, which aspect of Jupiter?

terms of its mass and its semi-major axis.

So anything beyond about half an AU, so half the distance of the Earth and the Sun, and something of order of a tenth of a Jupiter mass, that's the mass of Saturn, up to say 10 Jupiter masses, which is basically where you start to get to brown dwarfs.

Those types of objects appear to be somewhat unusual.

Most solar systems do not have Jupiters, which is really interesting because

Jupiter again, like the Moon, seems to have been a pivotal character in the story of the development of our Solar System, perhaps especially having a large influence on the development of the late heavy bombardment and the rate of asteroid impacts that we receive and things like this.

Anyway, to come back to 1625, this Jupiter-like planet had a hint of something in the data.

But what I mean by that is when we looked at the transit, we got the familiar decrease in light that we always see when a planet tries in front of the star, but we saw something extra.

Just on the edges, we saw some extra dips around the outside.

It was right at the hairy edge of detectability.

We didn't believe it because I think one of the challenges of looking for something for 10 years is that you become your own greatest skeptic.

And no matter what you're shown, you're always...

thinking I've been, it's like falling in love so many times and it not working out.

You convince yourself it's never gonna be, it's never gonna happen.

Not for me, this just isn't gonna happen.

And so I saw that and I didn't really believe it because I didn't dare let myself believe it.

But being a good scientist, we knew we had an obligation to publish it, to talk about the result and to follow it up and to try and resolve what was going on.