Type of site Astronomy Created by Jean Schneider | Owner Paris Observatory Revenue 5 Registration none | |
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia is an astronomy website, founded in Paris, France at the Meudon Observatory by Jean Schneider in February 1995, which maintains a database of all the currently known and candidate extrasolar planets, with individual "note" pages for each planet and a full list interactive catalog spreadsheet. The main catalogue comprises databases of all of the currently confirmed extrasolar planets as well as a database of unconfirmed planet detections. The databases are frequently updated with new data from peer-reviewed publications and conferences.
In their respective pages, the Planets are listed along with their basic properties such as the year of planet’s discovery, mass, radius, orbital period, semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination, longitude of periastron, time of periastron, maximum time variation, and time of transit, including all error range values.
The individual planet data pages also contain the data on the parent star such as Name, Distance (pc), Spectral Type, Effective Temperature, Apparent Magnitude V, Mass, Radius, Age, Right Asc. Coord., Decl. Coord. Even when they are known, not all of these figures are listed in the interactive spreadsheet catalog. And many missing planet figures that would simply require the application of Kepler's third law of motion are left blank. Most notably absent on all pages is the star's luminosity.
As of June 2011, the catalog aims to include objects up to 25 Jupiter masses, an increase on the previous inclusion criteria of 20 Jupiter masses.