If I follow your argument about 16 bit cameras, why are hundreds of earth sized planets detected with the transit method? (< 2R)
It may be that these are stars with smaller diameters, so the smaller planets occlude a larger fraction compared to sun-like stars.
Otherwise I suspect the required hardware is likely out of reach for amateurs with current technology.
Edit: Found these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEarth_Project
> The MEarth Project is a United States NSF-funded, robotic observatory that is part of Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, US. The project monitors the brightness of thousands of red dwarf stars with the goal of finding transiting planets. As red dwarf stars are small, any transiting planet blocks a larger proportion of starlight than transits around a Sun-like star would. This allows smaller planets to be detected through ground-based observations.
https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/s...
> The mission for SPECULOOS is to detect terrestrial planets as they transit across small, cool stars in the solar neighbourhood
It seems the terrestrial planets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST detected are also around dwarf stars.
So I guess the summary is: finding and detecting earth-like planets around dwarf stars is possible, however around sun-like stars not quite yet using these two methods
Your point on period length stands. And anyway I'm just waxing lyrical, I'm a statistician and amateur stargazer not a pro :)
Sun-like is important in the search for life because despite putting out lots more energy, the suspicion is that yellow stars tend to be less temperamental in their flare behavior (so they don't scour the surface of any potential planets with large amounts of radiation every once in awhile). And there is evidence that our sun is even a particularly calm yellow star. The habitable zone is also in a region that doesn't tidally lock the planet; a day-night cycle seems important though not neccesarily a requirement for habitability. And yellow stars' lifecycle seems to be long enough to allow for life to form and evolve. Essentially they seem most likely to produce habitable planets - it's probably not mere happenstance that we live around one.
Even finding just one such planet will require a lot of observation:
The "geometric probability" of the orbital plane being aligned for an earth-like orbit seems to be around 0.5% [0]. Assuming every star has an earthlike planet [1], only 1 in 200 observed stars will be correctly aligned.
So observing 365*200=73,000 stars over an entire day (also not possible for ground-based telescopes due to the day/night cycle) should statistically result in one transit observation. The transit duration is also a problem, for an earth-like exoplanet it is 13 hours, so if the observation time is too short, one would only catch the beginning or end of the transit
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Transit-Properties-for-S...
[1] The current hypothesis seems to be that every star has at least one planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet-hosting_star), but it's all a bit up in the air as not many exoplanets (and especially earth-like ones) have been observed yet. The sample size is too low.
I think you mean, that stars have at least one planet on average. E.g. in the unlikely event that only one third of stars had planets, but each one of those stars had on average 3 stars, then it would fit the hypothesis of averaging at least one planet per star. It's not a stretch at all since our rather boring star has at least 8 planets, and of the 4,051 stars we can currently detect with exoplanets, they have a total of 5,438 planets, meaning over 1.34 planets per star not including the unknown but unquestionably vast number of planets we currently don't have the capability of detecting.
Still, just as we suspect large numbers of rogue planets that have lost their stars, there must be at least some stars out there that have lost their planets, whether to passing neutron stars or perhaps indigestion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_exoplanets#:~:text=Th...
Unlike work charts though, I suspect they’re using FFT analysis to break down periodic signals.