Sdss.org is Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one of the most ambitious

Rating: 0 - 0 votes

Company Logo

Company Name

Company Contact

Website Analysis

Domain Whois

WHOIS information for Sdss.org

Powered by who.is

Page Type

This page is about a company.

Title

Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Description

Mapping the Universe

Mapmaking, laying the gridwork for reality, is an activity central to the step-by-step advance of human knowledge. The last decade has seen an explosion in the scale and diversity of the mapmaking enterprise, with fields as disparate as genetics, oceanography, neuroscience, and surface physics applying the power of computers to recording and understanding enormous and complex new territories. This ability to record and digest immense quantities of data in a timely way is changing the face of science. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the most ambitious astronomical survey project ever undertaken, will bring this modern practice of comprehensive and quantitative mapping to cosmography, the science of mapping the universe and determining our place in it.

The Sky Survey will systematically map one-quarter of the entire sky, producing a detailed image of it and determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects. It will also measure the distance to a million of the nearest galaxies, giving us a three-dimensional picture of the universe through a volume one hundred times larger than that explored to date. The Sky Survey will also record the distances to 100,000 quasars, the most distant objects known, giving us an unprecedented hint at the distribution of matter to the edge of the visible universe.

The Sky Survey is the latest in an ancient and honorable tradition of surveying the sky. Many of humanity's earliest permanent records describe the attempts to frame the universe. The Sky Survey will advance this tradition in a number of ways. As the first large-area survey to use electronic light detectors, the image it produces will be substantially more sensitive and accurate than earlier surveys, which relied on photographic techniques. The results of the Sky Survey will be available to the scientific community electronically, both as images and as precise catalogs of all the objects discovered. The Sky Survey also represents a significant increase in scale. The total quantity of information produced, about 15 terabytes (trillion bytes), rivals the information content of the Library of Congress.