Celestia Forums

its been recently announced that exoplanet Gliese 581 G is the first planet found in the 'goldilocks' habitable zone . Apparently comparable to earth and may harbor life . Is anyone working on a rendition ?

This is good idea, I'm sure someone will do this as add-on.

Planet is unconfirmed, the HARPS people don't see it. Having played around with the publically-available datasets using the Systemic console, I'm not convinced either.

You used both the HARPS and Keck datasets?

Used the HIRES data in the Vogt et al. (2010) paper, and the HARPS data from 2009. (The new HARPS data is not yet published, so I can't do anything with that.)

If I try to use the HIRES data alone, I can only find planets b and c. The sampling periodogram contains significant periods which seem to be associated with the lunar month, yearly, half-yearly and daily cycles, so the data is probably full of aliases.

The HARPS data alone clearly reveals planets b,c,d and e, but shows absolutely no sign of anything at the periods of f and g. Incorporating either makes the fit worse.

Given these planets (f and g) can only be found when the HIRES data is merged into the HARPS data, I suspect they may be artifacts of the data merging. Don't get me wrong, it'd be great if they exist, but I don't think the case is solid yet.