Followup on the Red Dwarf Planet Hunt

Jacob Bean, lead author of the paper on red dwarfs discussed here yesterday, weighs in with additional useful information about the study. “The planet-metallicity connection has been firmly established for high-mass (Jupiter and super Jupiter) planets,” wrote Bean. “I believe there is not supposed to be a low-mass, including terrestrial, planet formation dependence on disk metallicity (except in the very extreme case of zero metal disks).” The upshot: pre-selecting M dwarfs for possible terrestrial planets still isn’t possible based on metallicity, though it may be predictive of gas giant worlds. The expanding dataset on M dwarf metallicity should eventually tell us more.