No Sub-Saturn-mass Planet Desert in the CORALIE/HARPS Radial-velocity Sample

Abstract

Abstract We analyze the CORALIE/HARPS sample of exoplanets found by the Doppler radial-velocity method for signs of the predicted gap or “desert” at 10–100 M ⊕ caused by runaway gas accretion at semimajor axes of <3 au. We find that these data are not consistent with this prediction. This result is similar to the finding by the MOA gravitational microlensing survey that found no desert in the exoplanet distribution for exoplanets in slightly longer period orbits and somewhat lower host masses (Suzuki et al. 2018). Together, these results imply that the runaway gas accretion scenario of the core accretion theory does not have a large influence on the final mass and semimajor axis distribution of exoplanets.