Or, as Dr. Batalha said, “We’re not stamp collecting, we’re doing statistics.”Another result reported on Monday deepened a mystery about how nature goes about making planets. “It doesn’t take much gas to puff up a planet,” Mr. Fulton said. In the end, they almost ran out of room on the list, Dr. Batalha recalled, which wound up running to 9,000. This volatility, or noise, made it especially hard for Kepler’s crew members to see what they most wanted to see — small rocky planets with years as long as the Earth’s. “We had to live with what we got,” Dr. Batalha said.

Source: New York Times June 19, 2017 15:00 UTC