Huge New Astronomy Database Now Available to the Public
A still photo from an animated flythrough of the universe using SDSS data. This image shows our Milky Way Galaxy. The galaxy shape is an artist's conception, and each of the small white dots is one of the hundreds of thousands of stars as seen by the SDSS. Image credits: Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc. and Jonathan Bird (Vanderbilt University)
Penn State University astronomers are among the scientists of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) who this week are releasing to the public a massive collection of new information about the universe. "This set of observations is one of the largest astronomical databases ever assembled," remarked Donald Schneider, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State.
"The more than 70 Terabytes we collected during the third epoch of this survey, SDSS-III, contain information on nearly half-a-billion stars and galaxies, including three-dimensional cosmic structures that formed billions of years before the Sun began to shine," Schneider said. "This data release will undoubtedly form the basis for many future scientific investigations." Schneider is the SDSS-III survey coordinator and the project's scientific publication coordinator.
"The most astonishing feature of the SDSS is the breadth of groundbreaking research it enables," said SDSS-III Director Daniel Eisenstein of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "We've searched nearby stars for planets, probed the history of our Milky Way, and measured nine billion years of our universe's accelerated expansion. Our data also provide the first direct probe of the expansion rate of the universe ten billion years ago."
Niel Brandt, Penn State's Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is the SDSS-III leader of a number of projects investigating the properties of quasars, which are supermassive black holes that are devouring enormous amounts of matter, releasing amazing amounts energy in the process. "SDSS-III consists of four independent surveys," he said. "The fields range from searches for planets around nearby stars, to the chemical and dynamical evolution of our galaxy, to the large-scale structure of our universe."
After a decade of design and construction, the SDSS team began mapping the cosmos in 1998, using the dedicated 2.5-meter Sloan Foundation Telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Each phase of the project has used this telescope, which is equipped with a succession of powerful instruments, for a distinct set of astronomical surveys. SDSS-III started observations in July 2008 and completed its six-year, $45 million program in June 2014. The SDSS-III Collaboration includes 51 member institutions and one thousand scientists from around the world.
A still photo from an animated flythrough of the Universe using SDSS data. This image shows a small part of the large-scale structure of the Universe as seen by the SDSS - just a few of many millions of galaxies. The galaxies are shown in their proper positions from SDSS data. Image credit: Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc.
"One of the many innovations of SDSS-III was the construction of a high-resolution, infrared instrument that could examine the compositions and motions of hundreds of stars simultaneously," said Penn State Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Suvrath Muhadevan. "This aspect of SDSS-III produced detailed measurements of over 100,000 stars in the Milky Way and already is providing new insights into the formation and evolution of our galactic home." Mahadevan has been involved in a number of the SDSS-III investigations of planetary and stellar systems.
"One of the most important decisions we made at the beginning of the SDSS was that we would release all of our data, so everyone could use it," said Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins University, which developed the powerful online interfaces that most astronomers and many in the general public use to access the SDSS.
The Sloan Survey has begun its fourth phase, SDSS-IV, and is continuing on a new six-year mission to study cosmology, galaxies, and the Milky Way. Penn State is an institutional member of SDSS-IV. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III web site is http://www.sdss3.org.
CONTACTS at Penn State:
Niel Brandt 1-814-865-3509 wnb3@psu.edu
Suvrath Mahadevan 1-814-865-0261 sqm107@psu.edu
Donald Schneider 1-814-863-9554 dps7@psu.edu
Penn State Public Information Officer: Barbara Kennedy 1-814-663-4682 science@psu.edu
CONTACTS at SDSS:
SDSS Director: Daniel Eisenstein, Harvard University, deisenstein@cfa.harvard.edu, 1-617-495-7530
SDSS Spokesperson: Michael Woods-Vasey, University of Pittsburgh, wmwv@pitt.edu, 1-412-624-2751
SDSS Press Officer: Jordan Raddick, SDSS-IV Public Information Officer, Johns Hopkins University, raddick@jhu.edu, 1-410-516-8889
MORE ABOUT THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY:
SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University.