About the use of this catalog

update: 27 November 2007

• Purpose
  Working tool providing all the latest detections and data announced by professional astronomers, useful to facilitate progress in exoplanetology.

  Ultimately, researchers willing to make a quantitative, scientific, use of the catalog can make their own judgement on the likelihood of data and detections.

• Criteria for inclusion in the catalog
  • Physical criteria
    The basic criterion is, in principle, the mass limit: 13 Jupiter mass.
    This criterion (based on absence of a thermonuclear source of energy) is somewhat arbitray since a companion could start its formation by dust accretion in a disk and end -up with a mass > 13 M_Jup.
    But, do to the lack of precision in the definition of a planet, this criterion has to be made more flexible. For instance, if the star has a planetary companion, other companions with masses less than 20 Jupiter masses are included.

    An additional difficulty comes from the uncertainty in the mass value (for instance an object with a mass 19 +/- 3 M_Jup could have a true mass value < 13 M_Jup with a 2 sigma statistical deviation (= 12% probability).

    We thus finally include planets with masses < 20 Jup up to 2 sigma

  • Confidence criteria
    Are included:
    • Planet detections published in refereed papers (R)
    • Planet detections published in papers submitted to professional journals (S)
    • Planet detections announced by profesionnal astronomers in professional conferences (C)
    Detections resting only on transits (no radial velocity available) are labelled (T) and are in the "Unconfirmed" section of the catalog..

• Data
  
  • Planet data
    Planet data are the latest data known. They are taken from:
    • Latest published papers or professional preprints and conferences
    • First-hand updated data on professional websites. These presently are:
      • Anglo-Australian Planet Search
      • California & Carnegie Planet Search
      • Geneva Extrasolar Planet Search Programmes
      • Transatlantic Exoplanet Survey
      • University of Texas - Dept. of Astronomy

  • Stellar data
    Stellar data (positions, distances, V mag, mass, metallicities etc) are taken from Simbad or from professional papers on exoplanets.

• Planet names
  For single planetary companions to a host star, the name is generally NNN b where NNN is the parent star name.
  For multi-planet systems, the planet names are NNN x where x = b, c, d, etc refers to the chronological order of discovery of the planet.
  Exceptions are possible, like TrES-1 or planets detected by microlensing.
  For "free floating" planets, the name is the name given by the discoverers.

• Functionalities
  Are provided, with different on-line filters:
  • Histogrammes for planet and stellar characteristics
  • Correlation diagrammes between characteristics
  These statistics are only indicative since they do not take into account possible biases.

  For the use of statistics see Stats README

Acknowledgements
The functionalities offered would not have been possible without the technical help of Cyril Dedieu.