Saturday was an epic day for the radial velocity consuming public. Paul Butler and the California-Carnegie planet search team published a blockbuster paper in the Astrophysical Journal, and it looks like the first weekend’s gross is gonna be huge. The paper announces the detections of five new planets, and publishes re-analyzed and (in many cases) greatly expanded radial velocity data sets for no less than eighty three planet-bearing stars. The velocities are all available in machine-readable tabular form. No dextering, no unfolding, no typing, no postscript extractions. As an added plus, the paper also provides the latest estimates for jitter, mass, metallicity, and vsin(i) for all of the tabulated stars.

Needless to say, there’s a great deal of interesting data in this compendium. The updated 55 Cancri velocities, for example, should aid the characterization of a fully self-consistent model of that system. The slew of fresh velocities will be of great help in constraining the uncertainties in the transit predictions for planet bearing stars.

I dug right in to see how the 51 Peg system (described in a series of posts detailed here) is holding up. There are now 256 new and updated velocities from Lick Observatory to complement the 153 published Swiss velocities. The time-series shows a well-sampled mixture of long-term cadence and intensive monitoring.

Needless to say, 51 Peg b is still present with a vengeance. The power spectrum of the combined 409-point data set has a certain overwhelming 4.231 day character:

The data set phased at 4.2307 days shows a very nice sinusoid. About a thousand orbits have been folded down to make this plot:

So how does 51 Peg “c” fare in the new dataset? I’ll post an analysis tomorrow. If you’re impatient, though, you can use the downloadable console to investigate what the new data has to say.