Feb 23, 2017 · 1 min read
I thought the “1.2 Earth radius 2 times Earth mass” wasn’t a hard-and-fast boundary. It’s just that below that, planets never hold on to any meaningful hydrogen atmosphere, and above it they become increasingly likely to do so depending on the metallicity of the star (up to around 1.5 times Earth radius and 5–6 times Earth mass, beyond which they’re virtually always Sub-Neptunes).
That graph is confusing, but it looks like there are still a number of planets beyond the boundary on the same trend line as that below it.