What is the Most Common Type of Planet in the Galaxy?

Astronomers now believe there is at least one planet for every star in the Milky Way but new research has revealed a deeply unsettling twist in that picture. The most common planets in our Galaxy, it turns out, are almost entirely absent around the most common stars. Using data from NASA's TESS satellite, researchers found that the small, faint stars that make up the vast majority of the Milky Way seem to host rocky super Earths in abundance, but virtually no sub Neptunes, the planet type previously thought to be plentiful. The finding doesn't just refine existing theories of planet formation, it rewrites them. For the past decade, astronomers thought they had a reasonable answer to that question. Around stars like our Sun, the two dominant planet types are sub-Neptunes, worlds resembling a shrunken Neptune, with thick gaseous envelopes and super-Earths, ro... [3378 chars]