The SOPHIE search for northern extrasolar planets - I. A companion around HD 16760 with mass close to the planet/brown-dwarf transition

We report on the discovery of a substellar companion or a massive Jupiter orbiting the G5V star HD 16760 using the spectrograph SOPHIE installed on the OHP 1.93-m telescope. Characteristics and performances of the spectrograph are presented, as well as the SOPHIE exoplanet consortium program. With a minimum mass of 14.3 MJup, an orbital period of 465 days and an eccentricity of 0.067, HD 16760b seems to be located just at the end of the mass distribution of giant planets, close to the planet/brown-dwarf transition. Its quite circular orbit supports a formation in a gaseous protoplanetary disk.