The Twenty-Five Year Lick Planet Search

Abstract

The Lick planet search program began in 1987 when the first spectrum of $τ$ Ceti was taken with an iodine cell and the Hamilton Spectrograph. Upgrades to the instrument improved the Doppler precision from about 10 m/s in 1992 to about 3 m/s in 1995. The project detected dozens of exoplanets with orbital periods ranging from a few days to several years. The Lick survey identified the first planet in an eccentric orbit (70 Virginis) and the first multi-planet system around a normal main sequence star (Upsilon Andromedae). These discoveries advanced our understanding of planet formation and orbital migration. Data from this project helped to quantify a correlation between host star metallicity and the occurrence rate of gas giant planets. The program also served as a test bed for innovation with testing of a tip-tilt system at the coud{é} focus and fiber scrambler designs to stabilize illumination of the spectrometer optics. The Lick planet search with the Hamilton spectrograph effectively ended when a heater malfunction compromised the integrity of the iodine cell. Here, we present more than 14,000 velocities for 386 stars that were surveyed between 1987 and 2011.

32 pages, 12 figures (396 figures in the extended online figure set), 2 stub Tables (full tables in the online edition of the ApJS)