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Session 70 - Searching for Other Planetary Systems.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The precison of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) astrometry of the 11 radio-emitting stars observed for the Hipparcos mission is better than 1 milliarcsecond, in general, and reaches 0.2 milliarcsecond for the best result on the star \sigma^2 CrB at 22 parsecs and observed regularly for 7 years now. This level of precision is comparable to the wobble expected if a 1 Jupiter mass planet orbits this star. We shall present these results and discuss the improvements of the technique to reach the S/N limited astrometric precision of 10 microarcseconds providing a mean to detect a Jupiter mass planet at the 20-sigma level, i.e. yielding directly the planet mass, not its mass times sini, with a precision of 5%.
