On 14 December 2009, scientists announced the discovery at least one planet orbiting around HD 1461.[11][12] The planet, a super-Earth with a 5.8-day orbit was designated HD 1461 b. The data also contained evidence for additional planets with orbital periods of around 400 and 5000 days but the star showed small variations with similar periods, casting doubt on the interpretation of these signals as being caused by orbiting planets.
In 2011, a paper was published on the arXiv pre-print server giving an orbital solution incorporating data from the HARPS spectrograph. This solution recovered the previously-known planet HD 1461 b, and an additional planet in a 13.5-day orbit.[13] The 13.5-day planet HD 1461 c was confirmed in 2015.[14]
Other than HD 1461 b, the designations for the planets are inconsistent: in the original paper, Rivera et al. designated the 400 and 5000-day candidates as "c" and "d" respectively, whereas the Mayor et al. (2011) pre-print uses the "c" designation for the 13.5-day planet and does not mention the 400-day or 5000-day planets at all.
HD 1461 b has a mass 6.44 times that of the Earth while HD 1461 c has a mass times 5.59 that of the Earth.[14]
^ abKeenan, Philip C.; McNeil, Raymond C. (1989), "The Perkins catalog of revised MK types for the cooler stars", Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 71: 245, Bibcode:1989ApJS...71..245K, doi:10.1086/191373.
^Holmberg; et al. (2009). "HD 1461". Geneva-Copenhagen Survey of Solar neighbourhood III. Retrieved 2010-12-04.
^Mayor; et al. (September 2011). "The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets XXXIV. Occurrence, mass distribution and orbital properties of super-Earths and Neptune-mass planets". arXiv:1109.2497 [astro-ph.EP].