Furthermore, formation models predict that atmospheric erosion of short-period planets results in the presence of a ‘photoevaporation valley’, i.e. a gap in the radius distribution of planets around 1.75–2 R⊕.
The paucity of planets in that range, known as the “Fulton gap” after the lead author of the paper that pointed it out (opens a new tab), first appeared in the findings of the Kepler Space Telescope, which hunted exoplanets for nearly a decade before passing the torch to TESS.
