Sloan Telescope Spots One Hundred Thousand Black Hole Behemoths

[n2doc]

Analysis by Nicole Gugliucci

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has mapped the sky and created a database of millions of objects for astronomers to study. This, all with a 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico. The latest data release catalogs 105,783 quasars, or the active centers of distant galaxies with supermassive black holes.

At the time that SDSS began, only 6,000 quasars were known. Now, this huge database gives the positions, colors, and distances of over 100,000 quasars. The most distant of these is over 12.5 billion light years away, meaning that its light reaches us from when the universe was just over a billion years old.

This kind of project has been a major shift away from small teams studying individual objects with their telescope time. These data are taken and analyzed and made available to the entire astronomical community, such that a researcher or student at any institution can go in with an idea and use these massive catalogs to do their science.

The catalog, led by Donald Schneider of Penn State University, is being published by Astrophysical Journal this month, but can also be perused online via Arxiv.org. However, one of the most useful tool for accessing SDSS data is the SkyServer, so get cracking on some discoveries, astronomers!

http://news.discovery.com/space/sloan-spots-one-hundred-thousand-black-hole-behemoths.html



Slices through the SDSS 3-dimensional map of the distribution of galaxies. Earth is at the center, and each point represents a galaxy, typically containing about 100 billion stars. Galaxies are colored according to the ages of their stars, with the redder, more strongly clustered points showing galaxies that are made of older stars. The outer circle is at a distance of two billion light years. The region between the wedges was not mapped by the SDSS because dust in our own Galaxy obscures the view of the distant universe in these directions. Both slices contain all galaxies within -1.25 and 1.25 degrees declination.
Credit: M. Blanton and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

[phantom power]

1. I really like this trend.

I hope it catches on it all branches of science.

[liberation]

2. Indeed, data and information should be freely available to scientists

The more minds we throw at these questions, the quicker we will get answers.