t 17, Sart Tilman, Bât. B5c, B-4000 Liège, BelgiumExport citation and abstract BibTeX RIS
When the discovery paper was published, residuals from the 1.34 day orbital solution indicated a companion with several possible periods. With additional radial velocity measurements over the following months, the authors became concerned that the period of the outer planet was converging on one year. After checking for potential sources of error, the authors determined that there was an error in the barycentric correction, and that the outer planet was a detection of Earth's orbital motion. Qatar-2 was the first target observed by TRES with negative declination, and this uncovered a bug in the code that parsed the sexigesimal declination—the minutes and seconds of arc were parsed as positive instead of negative. This resulted in a low amplitude modulation of the barycentric correction due to Earth's motion around the Sun. No other published result from TRES is affected by this error. A reanalysis using the correct barycentric velocity shows that the orbital solution for Qatar-2b is unchanged from the results published in the discovery paper.