HD 149382 b - missing?

Don't like the sound of this poster:

V.A. Jacobs, R.H. Østensen, H. Van Winckel, S. Bloemen, P. Papics:
HERMES high-resolution spectroscopy of HD 149382: Where did the planet go?

http://www.sternwarte.uni-erlangen.de/conf2010/prog.html

Would be interesting to know what was going on there, and what the process was that mimicked the planetary signal.

Nevertheless there are a whole bunch of other interesting titles in that programme.

I see several upcoming planetary companions around WD, seeming decisive detections.

Various material from the Planets Beyond the Main Sequence conference is appearing on the arXiv. This one contains a few more clues as to the status of HD 149382b:

Quote :

However, Jacobs et al. (2010) analyzed He lines and found no evidence for the presence of this claimed planets. This debate will soon be resolved by further observations.

Jacobs et al. (2010) is the poster referenced in lodp's post.

HERMES high-resolution spectroscopy of HD 149382. Where did the planet go?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4158

Quote :

A close substellar companion has been claimed to orbit the bright sdB star HD 149382 with a period of 2.391d. In order to check this important discovery we gathered 26 high resolution spectra over 55 days with the HERMES spectrograph on the 1.2m Mercator telescope on La Palma, and analyzed the resulting radial velocities. Our data show no sign of any significant radial-velocity periodicities, and from the high precision of our measurements we rule out any RV variations with amplitudes higher than 0.79 km/s on periods shorter than 50 days.

edit: Updated thread title.

Pity really, it would have had fairly large implications for the evolution of planetary systems.

Non-Detection of the Putative Substellar Companion to HD 149382
http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1384

Quote :

It has been argued that a substellar companion may significantly influence the evolution of the progenitors of sdB stars. Recently, the bright sdB star HD 149382 has been claimed to host a substellar (possibly planetary) companion with a period of 2.391 days. This has important implications for the evolution of the progenitors of sdB stars as well as the source of the UV-excess seen in elliptical galaxies. In order to verify this putative planet, we made 10 radial velocity measurements of HD 149382 over 17 days with the High Resolution Spectrograph at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope. Our data conclusively demonstrate that the putative substellar companion does not exist, and they exclude the presence of almost any substellar companion with P < 28 days and Msin i >~ 1 Mjup.

Sirius_Alpha wrote:

Non-Detection of the Putative Substellar Companion to HD 149382

Some interesting observations in the discussion section about the various other subdwarf planets, including the circumbinary ones.