Retired A Stars and Their Companions. VII. 18 New Jovian Planets

Creators: Johnson, John Asher; Clanton, Christian; Howard, Andrew W.; Bowler, Brendan P.; Henry, Gregory W.; Marcy, Geoffrey W.; Crepp, Justin R.; Endl, Michael; Cochran, William D.; MacQueen, Phillip J.; Wright, Jason T.; Isaacson, Howard

Abstract

We report the detection of 18 Jovian planets discovered as part of our Doppler survey of subgiant stars at Keck Observatory, with follow-up Doppler and photometric observations made at McDonald and Fairborn Observatories, respectively. The host stars have masses 0.927 ≤ M_*/M_☉ ≤ 1.95, radii 2.5 ≤ R_*/R_☉ ≤ 8.7, and metallicities –0.46 ≤ [Fe/H] ≤+0.30. The planets have minimum masses 0.9 M_Jup ≤ M_P sin i ≲ 13 M_Jup and semimajor axes a ≥ 0.76 AU. These detections represent a 50% increase in the number of planets known to orbit stars more massive than 1.5 M_☉ and provide valuable additional information about the properties of planets around stars more massive than the Sun.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 May 10; accepted 2011 September 26; published 2011 November 29. Based on observations obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory and with the Hobby-Ebberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory. Keck is operated jointly by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology. Keck time has been granted by Caltech, the University of Hawaii, NASA, and the University of California. We thank the many observers who contributed to the observations reported here. We gratefully acknowledge the efforts and dedication of the Keck Observatory staff, especially Grant Hill, Scott Dahm, and Hien Tran for their support of HIRES and Greg Wirth for support of remote observing. We are also grateful to the time assignment committees of NASA, NOAO, Caltech, and the University of California for their generous allocations of observing time. J.A.J. thanks the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship program for support in the years leading to the completion of this work and acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-0702821 and the NASA Exoplanets Science Institute (NExScI). G.W.M. acknowledges NASA grant NNX06AH52G. J.T.W. was partially supported by funding from the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds. The Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds is supported by the Pennsylvania State University, the Eberly College of Science, and the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium. G.W.H. acknowledges support from NASA, NSF, Tennessee State University, and the State of Tennessee through its Centers of Excellence program. Finally, the authors wish to extend special thanks to those of Hawaiian ancestry on whose sacred mountain of Mauna Kea we are privileged to be guests. Without their generous hospitality, the Keck observations presented herein would not have been possible.

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