exoplanets at 99.999…%

The latest Significance has a short article providing some coverage of the growing trend in the discovery of exoplanets, including new techniques used to detect those expoplanets from their impact on the associated stars. This [presumably] comes from the recent book Cosmos: The Infographics Book of Space [a side comment: new books seem to provide material for many articles in Significance these days!] and the above graph is also from the book, not the ultimate infographic representation in my opinion given that a simple superposition of lines could do as well. Or better.

¨A common approach to ruling out these sorts of false positives involves running sophisticated numerical algorithms, called Monte Carlo simulations, to explore a wide range of blend scenarios (…) A new planet discovery needs to have a confidence of (…) a one in a million chance that the result is in error.”

The above sentence is obviously of interest, first because the detection of false positives by Monte Carlo hints at a rough version of ABC to assess the likelihood of the observed phenomenon under the null [no detail provided] and second because the probability statement in the end is quite unclear as of its foundations… Reminding me of the Higgs boson controversy. The very last sentence of the article is however brilliant, albeit maybe unintentionaly so:

“To date, 1900 confirmed discoveries have been made. We have certainly come a long way from 1989.”

Yes, 89 down, strictly speaking!