Searching for Planets in the Hyades. I. The Keck Radial Velocity Survey

Abstract

We describe a high-precision radial velocity search for Jovian-mass companions to main-sequence stars in the Hyades. The Hyades provides an extremely well controlled sample of stars of the same age, the same metallicity, and a common birth and early dynamical environment. This sample allows us to explore the dependence of the process of planet formation on only a single independent variable: the stellar mass. In this paper, we describe the survey and summarize results for the first 5 years.