if you want to help find planets, in the comfort of your home (as opposed to staying up all night on cold clear winter evenings), there is a place that you can go...
systemic is a web-site/blog run by Prof Greg Laughlin at UCSC to play with planet data
they do a lot of stuff, testing stability, inclination models, planet interactions etc all setup to run at the click of a button, you provide CPU cycles and eyeballs to look over the output.
systemic includes both synthetic data - testing observations of model systems, and real data, so users can run "solutions" for know systems, trying to fit the data better (eg look for small eccentricities etc)
The Gliese 581 data that was made public had been analysed, and six separate solutions showed the likely presence of a second planet in the data set - before the HARPS team got more data.
Now, the "false alarm" probability of those models was too high to claim a true detection, they were right in retrospect, but more data was needed to nail the system parameters.
But, there is going to be a LOT of this data, and modeling is getting computing intensive.
I don't know if anyone will ever get a first detection through such re-analysis, but there will be a lot of hints to suggest which followups to prioritise, and likely parameters (which would guide, for example, the observing cadence).
So, go do it.
PS: some colleagues, with my moral support, are working on a distributed planet formation and dynamics simulation package which we hope to have running in the finite future, I will post when something is ready to beta test
Hopefully this will give them more publicity and users. I've been following the systemic project from the beginning though I've been too lazy to participate.
Some sort of automatic systemic@home on BOINC could be cool...
Shouldn't the first detection still be credited- at least in part- to the guys in Chile who actually collected the data?
The detection credit belongs wholly to the HARPS team, Udry et al
The systemic detections were indicative but not published and not statistically robust.
In hindsight they show that the systemic data mining can actively guide future searches and possibly recover undetected planets, but it takes data to make a detection.