AAS Nova

Selections from 2017: Mapping the Universe with SDSS-IV

By on Features
Share:
SDSS
The Sloan Foundation 2.5-m telescope located at Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico. [SDSS]

Editor’s note: In these last two weeks of 2017, we’ll be looking at a few selections that we haven’t yet discussed on AAS Nova from among the most-downloaded papers published in AAS journals this year. The usual posting schedule will resume in January.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV: Mapping the Milky Way, Nearby Galaxies, and the Distant Universe

Published June 2017

 

Main takeaway:

The incredibly prolific Sloan Digital Sky Survey has provided photometric observations of around 500 million objects and spectra for more than 3 million objects. The survey has now entered its fourth iteration, SDSS-IV, with the first public data release made in June 2016. A publication led by Michael Blanton (New York University) describes the facilities used for SDSS-IV, its science goals, and its three core programs.

Why it’s interesting:

Since data collection began in 2000, SDSS has been one of the premier surveys providing imaging and spectroscopy for objects in both the near and distant universe. SDSS has measured spectra not only for the stars in our own Milky Way, but also for galaxies that lie more than 7 billion light-years distant — making it an extremely useful and powerful tool for mapping our universe.

What SDSS-IV is looking for:

MaNGA target

SDSS image of an example MaNGA target galaxy (left), with some of the many things we can learn about it shown in the right and bottom panels: stellar velocity dispersion, stellar mean velocity, stellar population age, metallicity, etc. [Blanton et al. 2017]

SDSS-IV contains three core programs:

  1. Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment 2 (APOGEE-2) provides high-resolution near-infrared spectra of hundreds of thousands of Milky-Way stars with the goal of improving our understanding of the history of the Milky Way and of stellar astrophysics.
  2. Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) obtains spatially resolved spectra for thousands of nearby galaxies to better understand the evolutionary histories of galaxies and what regulates their star formation.
  3. Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) maps the galaxy, quasar, and neutral gas distributions at redshifts out to z = 3.5 to better understand dark matter, dark energy, the properties of neutrinos, and inflation.

Citation

Michael R. Blanton et al 2017 AJ 154 28. doi:10.3847/1538-3881/aa7567