The headline as submitted isn't really correct. The planet is not the biggest found; there are several whose mass may be larger, like the exoplanets announced just last week (and this planet has 11 times the mass of Jupiter; we don't know its actual size). The real issue with HD 106906 b is that it is so far out from its parent star, much farther out than planets with that ass should form. Either it formed farther in and got tossed out (which is unlikely) or it formed where it was, which current theories say is difficult; usually objects forming that far out have much higher mass. I explain all this in my own blog post about it.

Given that about 1% of gas and diesel powered vehicles have a fire in their lifetime, I'm not very concerned about 1 in 6300.

You UK drivers are amateurs when it comes to fire. We merkins have 152,000 a year.

That doesn't necessarily make them more dangerous. I have a friend who lost a home to a fire that started in the engine compartment of a car in the garage. It was probably a leaky fuel line dripping onto a hot engine component. In your reconing is that an internal or an external heat source? Of order half a dozen car fires happen during a typical commute day on SF bay area freeways, and that's not counting the fires that start because of collisions.

It doesn't seem that likely that Teslas are any more fire prone than any other car. The rates for gasoline cars have about one serious (i.e. reported to police) fire per 18 million miles. If the average car goes 180K miles, that's about 1% that go up in flames at some point. The average Tesla hasn't gone that far, and I don't know what the fleet mileage is, but I'll be surprised if they are that flammable.

Folks- Please note a couple of math errors in the article (and in the headline I submitted here at /.). 1) The chance of it missing is 99.998%, and not 99.99998%. I misplaced a parenthesis when I did the math and wound up essentially getting 100 - 1/63000 instead of 1 - 1/63000. D'oh. 2) Also, the original circle I drew in the article was too big. This one makes me smile wryly: I first drew up the analogy as the circular cross-sectional area of a target region in space versus the cross-section of the Earth. Both are circles. However, a pixel is square! So my circle was too wide by a factor of the square root of pi, since the radius of the circle is the sqrt(area/pi). Put in 63,000 pixels for the area and the radius is 141. I corrected the article, sent a note to TPTB at Slashdot, and beg the forgiveness of math pedants everywhere. :)

When I drop a ball, and show that it follows the path predicted by gravitation, what more must I do to "show" that gravity caused the ball to fall.

When the atmospheric CO2 content increases and the global average temperature goes up about the amount Arrhenius said it would back in 1906 due to basic physical principles, and then I show that is in fact human emissions that caused the CO2 increase, what more must I do to "show" that global warming cause the temperature increase.