“Just 16 light years away”. Does the author have any idea of the actual distance and the fact that the methodology that “discovers” these planets is at best unproven.
They use Hipparcos Satellite to measure the distance using parallax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparcos
Basically, you look at the star while we are on one side of the Sun, comparing it’s location to the stars that are visually around it, then, in 6 months, check it again.
Using Trig, you know that the baseline distance from the two points is 186,000,000 million miles (approx), and you know the angle at the apex where the star is and the angles from the two earth positions.
I recommend reading “Parallax” by Alan Hirshfeld (if it can be found is about 15 years old now). Great read on how astronomers made this work.
“Does the author have any idea of the actual distance and the fact that the methodology that “discovers” these planets is at best unproven.”
Yes but that makes it as scientifically based as global warming. We should start shipping all Democrats and Muslims there immediately to create a marxist Utopia. They can send us updates occasionally and we can ignore them.
Meh... the method is pretty solid. If it isn’t a planet, it’s some very new, strange phenomenon that coindicentally “looks” exactly how one would expect a planet to look. And 16 light years is practically next door.
The silly part is in calling it a “super-earth” when its unclear if it’s a terrestrial and certainly is not similar in size to Earth.
But Mark Twain had a comment about that...
"Such large returns of conjecture, from so small investment in fact."
But no matter. We have hundreds if not thousands of laws enslaving us in different ways, invented by functional but elected morons, and nobody notices.