Last time I wrote about my summary of the Lick Planet Search at the at the OHP2015 conference; today I’ll finish up with what we learned from Keck.
In the mid-1990’s, Geoff and Paul were strengthening their connections to UC Berkeley, where with Gibor Basri they were using the Lick Observatory facilities.
Geoff and Paul in their UC Berkeley office circa 1994.
Having connections via UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley, they were able to plan to extend their planet search to the new new HIRES spectrograph at Keck Observatory, which was, like the Lick Hamilton spectrograph, designed by Steve Vogt
Of course, HIRES was going to need an iodine cell; here are Geoff’s instructions to SFSU glass blower Mylan Healy for its construction.
Notes on the construction of the iodine cell for Keck for SFSU glass blower Mylan Healy.
Debra Fischer joined the team as a postdoc in 1997, a couple years before I arrived in 1999. Here she is working to get a Fourier Transform Spectrograph scan of the Keck iodine cell:
Debra getting an FTS scan of the Keck iodine cell.
HIRES proved to be capable of more precise velocities than the Hamilton, regularly achieving 1-3 m/s precision on stable stars.
One of the biggest benefits of a long survey is that you can detect loooooooooong period planets. This culminated in a few significant discoveries I talked about at OHP: the 10th good Jupiter analog, announced by Sharon Wang (who is going to work with Paul in DC as a DTM Fellow this fall):
HD 37605 b and c, discovered with Keck and HET velocities.
And many more such planets were announced by Katherina Feng (now a grad student at UCSC). Here’s one some with large period ratios (the largest known between planets in a system — including in the solar system!)
HD 187123 b & c, which are the planets with the highest known well-measured period ratio
I also had some comments about activity cycles, but I’ll save those for another post, another time. If you’d like to learn more, my contribution to the conference proceedings is on the arXiv and on the OHP2015 site.
And there’s a link to video of my talk here.
Thank you! You might appreciate this story from Paul Butler. During an online search, I found out that he had credited my grandfather in his master’s thesis. He wrote me the following:
—-
Your grandfather was the first glass blower that I worked closely
with. I have since figured out that he was the archetype. When I
described for him what I wanted him to make, his first response was,
“That won’t be possible.”. I told him that I was willing to spend
the money, and if it was a failure it would be on me. So then of
course your grandfather made the original Lick Observatory Iodine
cell, and it was perfect. This was the Iodine cell that was used to
find 5 of the first 6 known extrasolar planets. The Smithsonian
museum has requested this Iodine cell.
I was very happy to acknowledge your grandfather in my SFSU master’s thesis:
Mr. Mylan Healy, SFSU chemistry glass blower, an artist with an
acetylene torch, who made the absorption cell a reality.
—
I am happy to be able to share this page and this story with his great grandchildren.
Wow, thanks for commenting! Those cells were extraordinarily important for exoplanet detection and the entire field of exoplanetary astrophysics. One of them, the one from Lick Observatory, now sits in the Smithsonian!
I really appreciate this. The glassblower, Mylan Healy, was my grandfather. We new about his art but very little about his professional work. Thank you for sharing.