How do we know if a planet is too light or too dense to be habitable to the life as we know on Earth? Moreover, do exoplanets in the habitable zone have a similar internal structure and chemical composition to that of Earth? I am collaborating with Earth Scientists to answer these questions. The figure below shows the density of about a dozen planets. This is from a nice work from Joe Schulze.
We can then use the following flowchart to determine if the planet is too light or too dense based on a comparison of the core mass fraction (CMF).
With the data published in Joe's paper, we can use Gaussian Mixture Model to classify planets into super-mercuries and normal planets. We can also use Hierarchical Bayesian Model to infer the frequency of each classification. Our work can be found in our latest paper by Joe, me, and collaborators.
