Mercury,
March/April 2003 Table of Contents
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The
Sloan Digital Sky Survey uses this dedicated 2.5-meter telescope
in New Mexico to survey the universe. Courtesy of Fermilab
Visual Media Services. |
by
Joshua A. Frieman and Mark SubbaRao
The
Sloan Digital Sky Survey is unlocking some of the universe's deepest
secrets, from the solar system and solar neighborhood to the most
distant quasars.
From
ancient times, humanity has sought to chart the heavens in order
to understand our place in the universe. Over the last 200 years,
mapmaking has become a major astronomical pursuit. In the 1800s,
the Herschel family assembled a Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters
with several thousand objects. In the early 20th century,
the advent of large optical telescopes and the recognition that
galaxies are external to the Milky Way led to major surveys of the
extragalactic universe. The Palomar and UK Schmidt Sky Surveys together
produced an all-sky map of several million galaxies. These surveys
have been indispensable tools for modern astronomy.
Twentieth-century
sky surveys used photographic plates to record the imaging data
in at most 2 or 3 optical wavebands. The recent emergence
of CCDs, which are 10 to 20 times more sensitive than photographic
plates, has permitted deeper imaging in the same exposure time.
CCDs also provide more reliable measurement of an object's brightness
(photometry) than do plates. The development of cameras employing
multiple CCDs has brought the dawn of the era of digital sky surveys.
The
Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which began taking data in 2000,
is the first large-area optical survey designed to exploit this
technology. The most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken,
its primary scientific mission is to study how galaxies cluster
on the largest scales. Using a dedicated 2.5-meter telescope at
Apache Point Observatory in southern New Mexico, the SDSS will determine
positions and brightnesses in five optical wavebands for about 100
million celestial objects (mostly galaxies), covering nearly a quarter
of the sky. The Survey will also acquire spectra for over 600,000
galaxies and more than 60,000 quasars, plus tens of thousands of
stars, X-ray sources, and radio sources.
We
can determine a galaxy's redshift from its spectrum, which tells
us how fast it is receding from us because of the expansion of the
universe. Through Hubble's law, a galaxy's redshift is proportional
to its distance. Thus, a spectroscopic redshift survey provides
a 3-dimensional census of the universe. The SDSS redshift survey
will be substantially larger than any previous spectroscopic survey.
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