Several CPS members recently presented new results at the 2020 Exoplanet Demographics Conference, hosted by the NASA Exoplanets Science Institute (NExScI) and IPAC/Caltech. Though the meeting was remote, the organizers set up virtual platforms that enabled lots of interaction and great discussions on exoplanet science amongst the participants – they did a fantastic job! Jerry Xuan presented a poster on his work investigating the dynamics of the π Men system,…
Read MorePlanet Pi
CPS members recently teamed up with astronomers from McDonald Observatory to discover and characterize a Jovian exoplanet on an eccentric (egg-shaped) orbit, which we affectionately call “Planet Pi.”* The CPS team has been observing the star HR 5183 for over 20 years as part of a radial velocity (RV) survey looking for giant planets with long orbital periods. RV astronomers look for planets around a star by measuring its speed…
Read Moreorbitize!
CPS team member Sarah Blunt recently led a paper documenting orbitize!, an open-source software package for fitting the orbits of directly imaged planets. One of the perks of directly imaging exoplanets is that we can directly watch them moving along their orbits. However, only the most widely-separated exoplanets can be seen over the glares of their primary stars. These wide separations translate to orbital periods that take decades or longer,…
Read MoreHackathon in Hawaii
The California Planet Search group has just finished a great week on Oahu! Starting on Tuesday, we gathered at the Institute for Astronomy to start building new database for our radial velocity observations. Over the course of three full days, we worked in teams to design a database structure, populate it with RV observations, and generate visualizations of our work. Many of us had never worked with Django before, or…
Read MoreKeck Planet Finder – Exposure Time Calculator
The Keck Planet Finder will be a transformational instrument for the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets. In advance of expected “first light” in 2021, we are releasing an ‘exposure time calculator’ that will compute the expected Doppler precision for KPF spectra given a set of observing and stellar properties. Check it out here!
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