The First Hobby-Eberly Telescope Planet: A Companion to HD 37605

We report the first detection of a planetary-mass companion to a star using the High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS) of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). The HET HRS now gives routine radial velocity precision of 2-3 m s^-1 for high signal-to-noise ratio observations of quiescent stars. The planetary-mass companion to the metal-rich K0 V star HD 37605 has an orbital period of 54.23 days, an orbital eccentricity of 0.737, and a minimum mass of 2.84 Jupiter masses. The queue-scheduled operation of the HET enabled us to discover this relatively short period planet with a total observation time span of just two orbital periods. The ability of queue-scheduled large-aperture telescopes to respond quickly to interesting and important results demonstrates the power of this new approach in searching for extrasolar planets, as well as in other areas of research requiring rapid response time critical observations.

Based on observations obtained with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, and Georg August Universität Göttingen.