Latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stories

SDSS-III Forget the restaurant at the end of the Universe — astronomers now have the clearest understanding yet of the bar at the center of the Milky Way. Scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) have announced the discovery of hundreds of stars rapidly moving together in long, looping orbits around the center of our Galaxy. "The best explanation for their orbits is that these stars are part of the Milky Way bar," says David Nidever, a Dean B. McLaughin Fellow in...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has announced the first major result of a new mapping technique, unveiling over 48,000 quasars. BOSS is the largest program of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and is mapping a huge volume of space to measure the role of dark energy in the evolution of the universe. “No technique for dark energy research has been able to probe this ancient era before, a time when matter...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The Milky Way apparently has one voracious appetite, as researchers from a prominent American university have discovered our home galaxy slowly consuming the remnants of an ancient star cluster. Astronomers from Yale University used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to locate a stream of stars being slowly ingested by the galaxy. While researchers have previously discovered evidence that the Milky Way has gobbled up dwarf galaxies,...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online While looking at one of the most distant quasars in the universe, astronomers were surprised to not see an underlying host galaxy of stars feeding it. NASA said the best explanation is that the galaxy is shrouded in so much dust that the stars are completely hidden everywhere. As stars aged and burned out in the early universe, they filled interstellar space with dust as they lost their atmosphere. The quasar dates back to an...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The distant quasar gas clouds that seemed to disappear off the grid were gone with the wind, according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers Nurten Filiz Ak and Niel Brandt of Pennsylvania State University led the team to search for the missing quasar gas clouds that seemed to disappear in just a few years. "We know that many quasars have structures of fast-moving gas caught up in 'quasar winds,' and now...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Approximately 8 billion years ago, the light from distant galaxies began streaming towards Earth. Now, at a mountaintop observatory in Chile, the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured that ancient starlight and recorded it for the first time. Early on September 12, 2012, the DECam, mounted atop the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The largest-ever 3-D map of massive galaxies and distant black holes was released this week in the hopes that it will help explain the mysteries of "dark matter" and "dark energy." This new sky map is the work of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-111) collaboration. SDSS-III is mission is to map the Milky Way, search for extrasolar planets, and solve the mystery of dark matter. The research team began to gather data in 2008 for...

Led by Berkeley Lab scientists, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s BOSS is bigger than all other spectroscopic surveys combined for measuring the universe's large-scale structure The Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has issued Data Release 9 (DR9), the first public release of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In this release BOSS, the largest of SDSS-III's four surveys, provides spectra for 535,995 newly observed galaxies, 102,100 quasars, and 116,474...

Berkeley Lab scientists are leaders of BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey- They and their colleagues in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey have announced the most precise measurements ever made of the era when dark energy turned on Some six billion light years ago, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been...

Pitt team used Sloan Digital Sky Survey to determine that the merger of double white dwarfs is a plausible explanation for Type Ia supernovae The origin of an important type of exploding stars—Type Ia supernovae—have been discovered, thanks to a research team at the University of Pittsburgh. Studying supernovae of this type helps researchers measure galaxy distances and can lead to important astronomical discoveries. A paper detailing this research has been accepted for publication in...