Erik A. Petigura studies exoplanet occurrence rates using transit observations. His 2013 study with Geoffrey W. Marcy and Andrew W. Howard independently searched Kepler space telescope photometry for small planets with orbital periods of – days.
To estimate how many planets the search missed, the team injected synthetic exoplanet transit signals into the observations and ran the detection procedure again. Correcting for this recovery rate changed the inference from a count of detected candidates to an estimate of the underlying population. Their inferred size distribution flattened below roughly twice Earth's radius.[ref]
A Plateau in the Planet Population Below Twice the Size of Earth by Erik A. Petigura and others. Abstract: period range, injected transits, recovery correction and size-distribution plateau
Portrait of Erik A. Petigura
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