The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Astrogeology, Asteroids, Robots, Space Flight & Extraterrestrial Matters

Date posted: 08/20/15

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been in operation for more than 15 years to make a map of the Universe and its subparts, and will continue for many years to come. The video below shows a flythrough of the SDSS map of the large-scale structure of the Universe. But this map in itself is not the SDSS real accomplishment; its real success is the revolutionary new knowledge that has been gained as a result. Measurements of large-scale structure in SDSS maps of galaxies, quasars, and intergalactic gas have become a central pillar of the standard cosmological model that describes our understanding of the history and future of the Universe. SDSS data have helped to demonstrate that the Universe is dominated by unseen dark matter and pervasive dark energy, and seeded with structure by quantum fluctuations in the infant cosmos. Those fluctuations have grown into the large-scale structure we see today. Powered by the accretion of gas onto supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, quasars are the most luminous objects in the Universe. With discoveries from its earliest imaging campaigns, the SDSS extended the study of quasars back to the first billion years after the Big Bang, showing the rapid early growth of black holes and mapping the end stages of the epoch of reionization. The clumps and streams found in the first SDSS star maps showed that the outer Milky Way is full of complex substructure – a finding confirmed and quantified as the SDSS imaged larger areas and mapped the motions of hundreds of thousands of stars. SDSS imaging enabled the discovery of a new population of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. To date, the majority of known Milky Way companions have been found by the SDSS, along with several new companions of the Andromeda galaxy. Asteroids can also be identified in SDSS imaging and cataloged because they change position during the course of an 8-minute exposure with the SDSS camera.