To paraphrase John F. Kennedy: The greater my knowledge increases, the more my previous ignorance unfolds. It is great to be with a team with awesome thinkers like @ctsats and others here, who never stop digging deeper and challenging their own understanding of the matters we forecast about. Highly recommended comments by Christos are here and here.
*** UPDATE: 2024-03-30 - I was wrong about the P_UPDATE column in my rationale I presented below - see my comment below or follow the link. ***
So, the insight about Kepler no longer being active for years cannot be read strongly since as @ctsats explained, there are still 3353 candidates exoplanets found by Kepler which still wait for confirmation or disconfirmation, and about 5000 candidates in total.
Now, things get interesting because the discovery rate is not the same as the rate of updating the catalog on resolution website and as @ctsats pointed out the year of discovery is not equal to the year of exoplanet being added to the catalog. The most recent update (March 21st) added TOI-904 c to the catalog. This exoplanet was discovered in 2023 (This publication listed here was published on December 7 2023), so we may think that there is a time lag of 3,5 months between publication of the article announcing the discovery and the planet being added to the catalog. But the problem is that as Christos mentioned, this is the third planet added to the catalog this year (in fact seventh if my analysis below are correct). We can confirm this with WayBack Archive for the copy of the website from the 9th of January this year: https://web.archive.org/web/20240109164551/https://phl.upr.edu/hwc
So before the question was published they added two more planets - I initially assumed that the most recent ones were added to the top of the list that would give us: TOI-700 e
I read this shortening intervals between the publication and addition to the catalog that the team behind the Habitable Worlds Catalog is themselves catching up to with the publications. So their three recent additions covers between 2020 and December 2023 but we now have 6 habitable or potentially habitable exoplanets discovered in 2023 in the catalog. This looks like they were adding both recent ones and some from the past. There is potential that they will add more exoplanets, which were discovered in the previous years but are not yet in the catalog. @ctsats I think we can learn more by the WayBack Machine on Archive.org, the trick is to know that the catalog has chaned its name and because of that also the website. I found the previous url by looking at Wikipedia editions history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets&oldid=1209717803 the previous url is https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog - if we work on that archived links we can learn how fast they were adding the exoplanets to the list and how often the list was updated (unfortunately interactive list of planets doesn't work in the recent versions of the website and many of the archived versions doesn't even have the number of planets visible - the total number is visible from December 2022). A year before the question opened there were 63 exoplanets on the list so they added 7 till now https://web.archive.org/web/20230228020942/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog but what is interesting the archived version from 31 December 2023 still shows 63! https://web.archive.org/web/20231231171144/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog - That would mean that they added 7 exoplanets to the catalog this year around the time of reorganization related to creating the new website in January this year.
We previously established that P_Year is a year of discovery, P_Update must be the last update date of any column. If based on the WayBack Machine archived version from 31 December 2023, we now know that 7 planets were added to the catalog this year, than we know that this must be some of the 8 with most recent update dates from this year, in the eight case I guess some other column was updated rather than it being added to the catalog. See my table below:
(sorry, one exoplanet from 2023 is not colored above - my LibreOffice Calc keep crushing and I lost the table)
This means that from the 7 added this year at most 2 were from 2023, and at least one was from 2013 (because there are two exoplanets from 2013 and at leat one must have been added this year).
If they keep up with this rate of public updates and if they will still be adding exoplanets discovered in previous years I think it makes it very probable, but I am not sure how they are organize - maybe the current updates are based on the past months of work, and new updates may require similar months of work. At the same time, if the additions are mostly from the previous years that unfortunately might mean (depending on the Question Team intentions), that resolution criteria may not fit well to the question of new exoplanets being found to be habitable since these exoplanets might have been found to be habitable many years ago. I guess the scientists behind the project put their own work into the habitability evaluation process and not only copy the results from others work, so that still makes sense because it becomes less about discoveries of new exoplanets and more about discovering exoplanets habitability.
Files
Why might you be wrong?
If this does not happen, I guess that should be the result of the team behind Habitable Worlds Catalog research (maybe they are all now publishing results from their past few months) and updating schedule (something like going back to work and not updating anymore like their one update in 2021, but I don't think it is probable, at the same time last year they were not publicly updating the catalog between February and December). It might also be the result of team catching up with the scientific publications from the previous years, but that seem less likely.
@ctsats I must be wrong about P_UPDATE column in the csv - being added to the catalog as potentially habitable does not cause this column to be updated. I was not able to find any descriptions for these columns but I will also check in the sav SPSS file, because SPSS files usually have metadata in the form of variables labels. Still, the count of 7 planets added this year seem solid. It is possible that they have added all 6 from 2023 this year plus one more. Looks like the count was the same for 2023 after Update on January 5, 2023. So all discoveries from 2023 must have been added this year + 1 from before. That poses a question - will they be updating the catalog real time for this year or just in the begining of the next year? Resolution criteria gives them one additional month for that, but most recent addition was made 2,5 months after the year ended - so if the 2024 was our guide most but not all will be counted. Still, we got one from last year counting toward the resolution so that kind of nullifies this disadvantage.
Planetary HabLab's Twitter account looks like an additional source worth checking for previous information and updates about planned updates https://twitter.com/PlanetaryHabLab
@404_NOT_FOUND@ctsats@cmeinel We can get the estimate about when exoplanet was added to the conservative sample of potentially habitable worlds by analyzing the images on the archived version of previous website:
For example:
the image from the January 2024:
From the 5th January 2023:
So these are the new ones:
TOI-700 e was discovered in 2023
TOI-715 b was discovered in 2023
Wolf 1069 b was discovered in 2023
K2-3 d was discovered in 2015
So we were able to find 7th exoplanet added to the list in 2024 (the only one that is not from 2023) and it is K2-3 d from 2015. It is important information because the fact that it is not some exoplanet found in the late 2022 confirms that they can add exoplanets which were already found many years in the past but are now found by the researchers to be fitting to the potentially habitable world criteria.
Why do you think you're right?
To paraphrase John F. Kennedy: The greater my knowledge increases, the more my previous ignorance unfolds. It is great to be with a team with awesome thinkers like @ctsats and others here, who never stop digging deeper and challenging their own understanding of the matters we forecast about. Highly recommended comments by Christos are here and here.
*** UPDATE: 2024-03-30 - I was wrong about the P_UPDATE column in my rationale I presented below - see my comment below or follow the link. ***
So, the insight about Kepler no longer being active for years cannot be read strongly since as @ctsats explained, there are still 3353 candidates exoplanets found by Kepler which still wait for confirmation or disconfirmation, and about 5000 candidates in total.
Now, things get interesting because the discovery rate is not the same as the rate of updating the catalog on resolution website and as @ctsats pointed out the year of discovery is not equal to the year of exoplanet being added to the catalog.
The most recent update (March 21st) added TOI-904 c to the catalog. This exoplanet was discovered in 2023 (This publication listed here was published on December 7 2023), so we may think that there is a time lag of 3,5 months between publication of the article announcing the discovery and the planet being added to the catalog. But the problem is that as Christos mentioned, this is the third planet added to the catalog this year (in fact seventh if my analysis below are correct). We can confirm this with WayBack Archive for the copy of the website from the 9th of January this year: https://web.archive.org/web/20240109164551/https://phl.upr.edu/hwc
So before the question was published they added two more planets - I initially assumed that the most recent ones were added to the top of the list that would give us:
TOI-700 e
TOI-700 d
So the problem is that TOI-700 e was announced in this publication from February 16, 2023 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acb599 and reported in the news in March https://theconversation.com/distant-star-toi-700-has-two-potentially-habitable-planets-orbiting-it-making-it-an-excellent-candidate-in-the-search-for-life-198274 this suggest about a year delay, much longer than with the latest publication.
And TOI-700 d was discovered on January 3, 2020 (Wikipedia specified the daily date, often I only see there a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOI-700_d) and the publication is from August 14, 2020: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aba4b2
I read this shortening intervals between the publication and addition to the catalog that the team behind the Habitable Worlds Catalog is themselves catching up to with the publications. So their three recent additions covers between 2020 and December 2023 but we now have 6 habitable or potentially habitable exoplanets discovered in 2023 in the catalog. This looks like they were adding both recent ones and some from the past. There is potential that they will add more exoplanets, which were discovered in the previous years but are not yet in the catalog.
@ctsats I think we can learn more by the WayBack Machine on Archive.org, the trick is to know that the catalog has chaned its name and because of that also the website. I found the previous url by looking at Wikipedia editions history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets&oldid=1209717803 the previous url is https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog - if we work on that archived links we can learn how fast they were adding the exoplanets to the list and how often the list was updated (unfortunately interactive list of planets doesn't work in the recent versions of the website and many of the archived versions doesn't even have the number of planets visible - the total number is visible from December 2022). A year before the question opened there were 63 exoplanets on the list so they added 7 till now https://web.archive.org/web/20230228020942/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog but what is interesting the archived version from 31 December 2023 still shows 63! https://web.archive.org/web/20231231171144/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog - That would mean that they added 7 exoplanets to the catalog this year around the time of reorganization related to creating the new website in January this year.
What is interesting, between December 2021 and December 2022 the catalog was updated only once: https://web.archive.org/web/20221204232019/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog - we can see 61 exoplanets here.
before that, we can see on version from December 2nd 2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20221202224039/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog "Last Update: December 6, 2021" - but in the csv we can see that they have been doing more updates to the catalog that year (see my table below - not all updates mean that the exoplanet was added, at some cases information about previous exoplanet was updated).
We previously established that P_Year is a year of discovery, P_Update must be the last update date of any column. If based on the WayBack Machine archived version from 31 December 2023, we now know that 7 planets were added to the catalog this year, than we know that this must be some of the 8 with most recent update dates from this year, in the eight case I guess some other column was updated rather than it being added to the catalog. See my table below:
(sorry, one exoplanet from 2023 is not colored above - my LibreOffice Calc keep crushing and I lost the table)
This means that from the 7 added this year at most 2 were from 2023, and at least one was from 2013 (because there are two exoplanets from 2013 and at leat one must have been added this year).
If they keep up with this rate of public updates and if they will still be adding exoplanets discovered in previous years I think it makes it very probable, but I am not sure how they are organize - maybe the current updates are based on the past months of work, and new updates may require similar months of work. At the same time, if the additions are mostly from the previous years that unfortunately might mean (depending on the Question Team intentions), that resolution criteria may not fit well to the question of new exoplanets being found to be habitable since these exoplanets might have been found to be habitable many years ago. I guess the scientists behind the project put their own work into the habitability evaluation process and not only copy the results from others work, so that still makes sense because it becomes less about discoveries of new exoplanets and more about discovering exoplanets habitability.
Why might you be wrong?
@ctsats I must be wrong about P_UPDATE column in the csv - being added to the catalog as potentially habitable does not cause this column to be updated. I was not able to find any descriptions for these columns but I will also check in the sav SPSS file, because SPSS files usually have metadata in the form of variables labels. Still, the count of 7 planets added this year seem solid. It is possible that they have added all 6 from 2023 this year plus one more. Looks like the count was the same for 2023 after Update on January 5, 2023. So all discoveries from 2023 must have been added this year + 1 from before. That poses a question - will they be updating the catalog real time for this year or just in the begining of the next year? Resolution criteria gives them one additional month for that, but most recent addition was made 2,5 months after the year ended - so if the 2024 was our guide most but not all will be counted. Still, we got one from last year counting toward the resolution so that kind of nullifies this disadvantage.
Planetary HabLab's Twitter account looks like an additional source worth checking for previous information and updates about planned updates https://twitter.com/PlanetaryHabLab
@404_NOT_FOUND @ctsats @cmeinel We can get the estimate about when exoplanet was added to the conservative sample of potentially habitable worlds by analyzing the images on the archived version of previous website:
For example:
the image from the January 2024:
From the 5th January 2023:
So these are the new ones:
TOI-700 e was discovered in 2023
TOI-715 b was discovered in 2023
Wolf 1069 b was discovered in 2023
K2-3 d was discovered in 2015
So we were able to find 7th exoplanet added to the list in 2024 (the only one that is not from 2023) and it is K2-3 d from 2015. It is important information because the fact that it is not some exoplanet found in the late 2022 confirms that they can add exoplanets which were already found many years in the past but are now found by the researchers to be fitting to the potentially habitable world criteria.