I am going up because of uncertainty related to my understanding of the situation (thanks to my friends @ctsats and @DimaKlenchin for helpful comments). I previously assumed that the schedule to check for new matches weekly is something new, something related to the reorganization of HWC in December last year (we saw how they changed the website and the catalog name). But maybe the fact that previous updates changing the number of exoplanets in the catalog happened most often in December and January reflects some pattern of data in the NASA exoplanets catalog being updated more often around this time (adding data from papers that first come out as preprints and were later published during the year). But if that was true, we should at least be seeing most of these papers as preprints already in https://arxiv.org/ database, and I haven't seen them, but my search may be insufficient - some papers confirming new exoplanets may not discuss that they are in habitable zone and I will not be able to find it in the haystack of preprints.
I checked the number of exoplanets meeting the first two out of three criteria of habitability used by HWC (mass and radius) and here are the numbers in the NASA Exoplanets catalog: 2024: 64 (so far)
2023: 126
2022: 122
2021: 302
2020: 108
2019: 75
2018: 163
2017: 66
2016: 1111
2015: 56
2014: 602
2013: 35
2012: 29
So far, we have about 50% of numbers from 2023 or 2022, but there is high variability in the numbers for years before 2022, so it is hard to say anything about the reporting speed based on that. However, in 2023 there were discovered 6 exoplanets which were added to the HWC, and in 2022 there were 5, so we are a bit unlucky with zero exoplanets halfway to getting to their numbers of new exoplanets fitting mass and radius criteria.
But in terms of updates changing the number of total exoplanets, January and July are on the podium, with February, May and June standing on the lower place on the podium together. This includes revisions related to removals.
Here is how it looks when we only look at additions (this question resolution only cares for new planets being added, removals are unimportant for our purposes, but removals likely happened due to new data being published or new methods and models providing more precise answers). We can see that we are already past the time in the year with most updates, but as January next year still counts, it is not that simple.
We should keep in mind that likely over the year situation changes - like with some missions starting and ending and their teams way of reporting being different, or as Christos was informed by the professor running HWC the process has changed over the years, and it is now largely automated. Look at this graph to see changes in time:
To better see the months of updates, here is another version with month number on the y axis:
@cmeinel SSRN used to be the Social Science Research Network, and although today it is supposedly extended to include preprints from the physical sciences too, I consider it extremely unlikely to find astronomy preprints there; and ResearchGate seems to me only a secondary venue. AFAIK, for astronomers (and physicists), arxiv rules - although the great majority of preprints seems to be posted there only after they have been accepted for publication in a journal.
Taking a step back (in order to see the big picture here), I would dare to argue that the spirit of forecasting such questions is not to pass our days in web searches of increased sophistication (and frequency), hoping to be just ahead of HWC updates; otherwise we may start reminiscing what Tetlock in his book termed as "supernewsjunkies".
I think the fact that TOI-904 c was added to the catalog in March this year confirm that there is a substantial lag between discovery. Preprint was submitted on 23 October, 2023 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15118) and it was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 959, Number 1 on December 7 2023
Well yeah, we had a brief discussion previously about uncertainties here, including the idea of maybe taking what the HWC has said with a grain of salt: it's true that the HWC head in his response to me in April he said that "The catalog is very automate today. I just type “hwc” in an IDL prompt and it downloads and analyze all current data"; but the delay you correctly point out here does not seem to conform to such a picture. except of course if we take "today" too literally, as describing a situation that was not in place even a few weeks before (which may be the case indeed, but still, we don't actually know...)
ArXiv has its own search that I suspect is way better than Google (anything is better than Google these days). Here is what I used when I looked at just exoplanets:
Advanced Search/Physics/astro-ph --> exoplanet AND discover (both in the Abstract). Narrow down by date range as needed and check "Show Abstracts".
The problem is that there is overlap with what's already in the catalog, so I would search catalog for the most unusual author name to weed out exoplanets from ArXive search that are already in the catalog.
Thanks @DimaKlenchin , I used both methods (Google search with site: can access article full text while ArXiv advanced search is good because it can help search abstracts and other fields). What I was also searching for was information about "habitable zone" or "HZ", because the number of new discoveries is much bigger than the new discoveries within HZ. At the same time, if we had a text mining method of reporting all the planets based on abstract, I could then compare it with the NASA exoplanet archive and see how many were not yet added. This question's complexity fascinates me, but the practical question is if in this case, in-depth understanding will bring us a big edge in forecasting over some simpler heuristics. I certainly hope that deeper understanding help, I think that data which I dug from archive.org made many things clearer, but we will see after resolution if this was worth anything.
I am going up because of uncertainty related to my understanding of the situation (thanks to my friends @ctsats and @DimaKlenchin for helpful comments). I previously assumed that the schedule to check for new matches weekly is something new, something related to the reorganization of HWC in December last year (we saw how they changed the website and the catalog name). But maybe the fact that previous updates changing the number of exoplanets in the catalog happened most often in December and January reflects some pattern of data in the NASA exoplanets catalog being updated more often around this time (adding data from papers that first come out as preprints and were later published during the year). But if that was true, we should at least be seeing most of these papers as preprints already in https://arxiv.org/ database, and I haven't seen them, but my search may be insufficient - some papers confirming new exoplanets may not discuss that they are in habitable zone and I will not be able to find it in the haystack of preprints.
I checked the number of exoplanets meeting the first two out of three criteria of habitability used by HWC (mass and radius) and here are the numbers in the NASA Exoplanets catalog:
2024: 64 (so far)
2023: 126
2022: 122
2021: 302
2020: 108
2019: 75
2018: 163
2017: 66
2016: 1111
2015: 56
2014: 602
2013: 35
2012: 29
So far, we have about 50% of numbers from 2023 or 2022, but there is high variability in the numbers for years before 2022, so it is hard to say anything about the reporting speed based on that. However, in 2023 there were discovered 6 exoplanets which were added to the HWC, and in 2022 there were 5, so we are a bit unlucky with zero exoplanets halfway to getting to their numbers of new exoplanets fitting mass and radius criteria.
As you can see below, historically, HWC was more active during December and January (data from the HWC updates database I created).
But in terms of updates changing the number of total exoplanets, January and July are on the podium, with February, May and June standing on the lower place on the podium together. This includes revisions related to removals.
Here is how it looks when we only look at additions (this question resolution only cares for new planets being added, removals are unimportant for our purposes, but removals likely happened due to new data being published or new methods and models providing more precise answers). We can see that we are already past the time in the year with most updates, but as January next year still counts, it is not that simple.
We should keep in mind that likely over the year situation changes - like with some missions starting and ending and their teams way of reporting being different, or as Christos was informed by the professor running HWC the process has changed over the years, and it is now largely automated. Look at this graph to see changes in time:
To better see the months of updates, here is another version with month number on the y axis:
I am also tagging:
@404_NOT_FOUND @cmeinel @Perspectus @guyrecord @sai_39 @ansantillan @Jim @NoUsernameSelected @JonathanMann @ansantillan @WeirdAwkward @JJMLP @Plataea479 @MrLittleTexas
@cmeinel SSRN used to be the Social Science Research Network, and although today it is supposedly extended to include preprints from the physical sciences too, I consider it extremely unlikely to find astronomy preprints there; and ResearchGate seems to me only a secondary venue. AFAIK, for astronomers (and physicists), arxiv rules - although the great majority of preprints seems to be posted there only after they have been accepted for publication in a journal.
Taking a step back (in order to see the big picture here), I would dare to argue that the spirit of forecasting such questions is not to pass our days in web searches of increased sophistication (and frequency), hoping to be just ahead of HWC updates; otherwise we may start reminiscing what Tetlock in his book termed as "supernewsjunkies".
But of course this is just me, and my 2 cents...
@michal_dubrawski
Well yeah, we had a brief discussion previously about uncertainties here, including the idea of maybe taking what the HWC has said with a grain of salt: it's true that the HWC head in his response to me in April he said that "The catalog is very automate today. I just type “hwc” in an IDL prompt and it downloads and analyze all current data"; but the delay you correctly point out here does not seem to conform to such a picture. except of course if we take "today" too literally, as describing a situation that was not in place even a few weeks before (which may be the case indeed, but still, we don't actually know...)
ArXiv has its own search that I suspect is way better than Google (anything is better than Google these days). Here is what I used when I looked at just exoplanets:
Advanced Search/Physics/astro-ph --> exoplanet AND discover (both in the Abstract). Narrow down by date range as needed and check "Show Abstracts".
The problem is that there is overlap with what's already in the catalog, so I would search catalog for the most unusual author name to weed out exoplanets from ArXive search that are already in the catalog.