An international team of astronomers this week released to the public two decades of observations from Mauna Kea’s W.M. Keck Observatory, data that include more than 100 potential exoplanets.

Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars other than the sun.

The release — comprising nearly 61,000 individual measurements from more than 1,600 stars — is described as the largest-ever compilation of exoplanet-detecting observations.

Described in a paper published in the Astronomical Journal, all the data were observed using one of the 10-meter twin telescopes of the Keck Observatory.

“It’s a big deal,” said Greg Doppman, Keck Observatory support astronomer. “By making this public, it really moves the field forward.”

The data, he said, give astronomers studying these particular stars and exoplanets — or anyone interested in studying them — a leg up on their research.

The international team of astronomers — including representatives from the Carnegie Institution for Science; University of California, Santa Cruz; Yale University; University of Hertfordshire; and Universidad de Chile — used a specialized instrument called the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer, or HIRES, mounted on the Keck-I telescope.

The instrument detects tiny wobbles of starlight caused by the gravitational pull of planets orbiting stars, with powerful instrumentation and advanced algorithms helping to translate the colorful signature of the exoplanets.

Of the 117 expoplanet candidates identified by the team, Doppman said, perhaps a dozen lie in the habitable zone, which is the region around a star that would have the right conditions to find liquid water on a planet’s surface, a key component of life as we know it.

The potential exoplanets come in a range of sizes and orbits. Some are smaller than Earth, while others are larger than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Some are as far away from their stars as Uranus is from the sun, and as close as Mercury.

Doppman gives credit to the observatory’s cutting- edge instrumentation and to the top-flight observing conditions on Mauna Kea, whose summit sits above 40 percent of Earth’s atmosphere.

“HIRES is an incredible tool, part of the suite of instruments used to perform all kinds of extraordinary observations with our telescopes,” he said.

Keck comprises two 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes featuring a range of advanced instruments, including imagers, spectrographs and laser guide star adaptive optics systems. The observatory is a nonprofit partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.