Astronomer Paul Butler, standing near a telescope other than the ones we used to find planets

The Exoplanet Orbit Database at exoplanets.org is now entirely maintained by students and researchers at Penn State.  It began as a table in a paper by Paul Butler of securely detected planets, and was maintained by him an Geoff Marcy back when the planet discovery pace was slow enough that it didn’t take much effort to keep up.  As a graduate student I took the IDL structure that kept all the information and kept it up to date, and greatly expanded it to include lots of other information.

Eventually, the list comprised hundreds of planets, and it became clear that a new table was in order.  It went online as the Catalog of Nearby Exoplanets.  We called it that because didn’t at the time really want to include planets that were different in kind from the ones we were detecting, because we had no interest in a comprehensive list.  Jean Schneider’s Exoplanet Encyclopedia at exoplanet.eu did a fine job of that; we wanted an internal list of secure RV planets that we were sure had good orbital parameters.  The CNE was our way to serve to the community by sharing that list.  The “Nearby” part gave us an easy, 100 pc threshold that limited us mostly to bright stars with RV planets, which was basically what we were interested in.

The CNE was a chapter of my thesis, and eventually we published it as a paper in ApJ.  Geoff recommended that Paul be listed as first author because he was the original driving force behind the catalog, and perhaps (I’m guessing) because I stepped on his toes by pushing ahead on the project, when he had been meaning to do it.  At any rate, I was the “primary” author of the paper, and it remains my highest cited publication (even ahead of another Butler paper, which is closing in on 300 citations: the discovery of GJ 436 b).

Onsi Fakhouri, once a lowly Berkeley Astronomy graduate student, now a snazzy and important software guy in San Francisco. Despite his new stature, he graciously continued to slum it with us at exoplanets.org and apply new features.

Then, a Berkeley graduate student named Onsi Fakhouri asked Geoff Marcy if he had a side project he could use to support himself while he finished his PhD.  Geoff asked him to develop a better Web interface for the catalog.

And boy, did he. The website Onsi put together was gorgeous, with a powerful data visualizer.  He called these tools Exoplanet Data Explorers, and they allow users to filter, sort, and plot data in their web browsers quickly and simply. It’s an amazing tool, I wish I had some idea how it worked!

When I got to Penn State and undergraduates and astronomy approached me and asked if I had a project for her to work on. I put Eunkyu to work on the catalog.  We extended many of the categories, and worked to include all of the exoplanets, not just the nearby radial velocity ones.  A year or so later, Katharina Feng joined our team. Between the two of them, they’ve read or scanned every paper describing the orbit of exoplanet, and most of the data in the database now passed through their fingers. It was a huge amount of work.

In 2011, we published all of this work as the new Exoplanet Orbit Database.

But there are more chapters to this story. More on that next time.