Planet candidates in open clusters

We present the first results of our HARPS long-term radial velocity (RV) survey which aims to discover exoplanets around intermediate-mass (between ~2 and 6M_{sun}_) evolved stars in open clusters.

We selected 826 bona fide HARPS observations of 114 giants from an initial list of 29 open clusters and computed the half-peak to peak variability of the HARPS RV measurements, namely {Delta}RV/2, for each target, to search for the best planet-host candidates. We also performed time series analyses for a few targets for which we have enough observations to search for orbital solutions. Although we attempted to rule out the presence of binaries on the basis of previous surveys, we detected 14 new binary candidates in our sample, most of them identified from a comparison between HARPS and CORAVEL data.