Proposed Discovery
A team of astronomers led by Stéphane Udry of the Geneva Observatory used the HARPS instrument on the European Southern Observatory 3.6 meter telescope in La Silla, Chile to discover the planet in 2007. Udry's team employed the radial velocity technique, in which the mass of a planet is determined based on the small perturbations it induces in its parent star’s orbit via gravity.
In September 2012, Roman Baluev filtered out the "red noise" from the Keck data and concluded that this planet's existence is probable only to 2.2 standard deviations.
Read more about this topic: Gliese 581 D
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