As Planet Discoveries Pile Up, A Gap Appears In The Pattern
Astronomers have used TESS to find hundreds of possible planets around the nearest stars since its launch in April 2018, including 24 confirmed worlds so far. In an April paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by Diana Dragomir, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works with TESS data, reported the discovery of a star system harboring two planets on either side of the gap, for instance. Akash Gupta and Hilke Schlichting of the University of California, Los Angeles demonstrated in research last year that as planets of certain sizes radiate heat from within into space, their atmosphere is blown away, which could send them to the other side of the radius gap.
Source: www.quantamagazine.org