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One of our science team, Yiannis Tsapras has produced a graphic showing interesting information about all the exoplanets listed on The Ex­tra­so­lar Plan­ets Encyclopaedia.

Each of the five dif­fer­ent tech­niques used to find ex­o­plan­ets is most sen­si­tive to con­fig­u­ra­tions that are dif­fer­ent from our own Solar sys­tem. Most de­tec­tions to date have been through the ra­dial ve­loc­ity method, with tran­sits com­ing a close sec­ond but soon ex­pected to take over as fresh de­tec­tions from the Ke­pler space mis­sion are an­nounced. Mi­crolens­ing and di­rect imag­ing are find­ing colder plan­ets fur­ther away from their host stars. For the time being no de­tec­tions by as­trom­e­try have been con­firmed.

Plan­ets found by dif­fer­ent meth­ods: The ex­o­planet dis­cov­ery space is rep­re­sented in this "orbit size-vs-planet mass" di­a­gram. The sen­si­tiv­i­ties of the var­i­ous meth­ods are shown from the ground and from space. The solar sys­tem plan­ets are in­di­cated by yel­low cir­cles. Mi­crolens­ing is a fast and cheap way to mea­sure the mass func­tion of colder plan­ets down to and below the mass of the Earth. This plot was pro­duced using data from The Ex­tra­so­lar Plan­ets Encyclopaedia.

The dot-dashed green lines are the current limits of transit searches from the ground and the Kepler mission. The red dashed lines are the limits of microlensing from the ground and from a future space mission. The symbols used to represent all detections by the different methods are shown on the plot legend at the top of the figure.