On February 13, a group of astronomers led by the Carnegie Institution released a huge catalog of observations of nearby stars. It is planned that this dataset will help everyone who has long dreamed of participating in the search for exoplanets.
The catalog, compiled on the basis of data obtained as a result of more than twenty years of work of the W.M. Kek in Hawaii includes over 61,000 dimensions of over 1600 stars. Along with the dataset, anyone can download open source software and an online tutorial to assist with self-analysis.
This catalog is the largest ever released using the radial velocity (RV) method, capturing the subtle movements of some stars that they make in response to internal or external stimuli (for example, the gravitational pull of exoplanets). The creation of this base was made possible thanks to non-standard thinking, which was used to create the HIRES instrument installed at the Keck Observatory. It was not originally designed to measure RV, but astronomers quickly realized they could use it for this purpose.
'Although HIRES was originally designed to search for faint galaxies, my teammates started planning to use HIRES to hunt alien worlds even before it was even installed,' said Jennifer Burt, an MIT scientist who is involved in the Digital Trends project.
The team kindly invites you to use your data: http://home.dtm.ciw.edu/ebps/data/.
