The SOPHIE search for northern extrasolar planets. III. A Jupiter-mass companion around HD 109246

We report the detection of a Jupiter-mass planet discovered with the SOPHIE spectrograph mounted on the 1.93-m telescope at the Haute-Provence Observatory. The new planet orbits HD 109246, a G0V star slightly more metallic than the Sun. HD 109246b has a minimum mass of 0.77 M_Jup, an orbital period of 68 days, and an eccentricity of 0.12. It is placed in a sparsely populated region of the period distribution of extrasolar planets. We also present a correction method for the so-called seeing effect that affects the SOPHIE radial velocities. We complement this discovery announcement with a description of some calibrations that are implemented in the SOPHIE automatic reduction pipeline. These calibrations allow the derivation of the photon-noise radial velocity uncertainty and some useful stellar properties (v sin i, [Fe/H], log R’_HK) directly from the SOPHIE data.

Based on observations made with the SOPHIE spectrograph on the 1.93-m telescope at Observatoire de Haute-Provence (CNRS/OAMP), France (program 07A.PNP.CONS).RV tables (Tables C.1 and C.2) are only available in electronic form at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/523/A88