Science

SDSS distribution of local galaxies

The original Sloan Digital Sky Survey and SDSS-II have a rich scientific legacy. Discoveries made with SDSS data have included:

Detection of the baryon acoustic peak in the clustering of galaxies
Mapping of streams of stars left from galaxy mergers in the Milky Way, as well as the discovery of many new dwarf companion galaxies of the Milky Way
The most distant quasars known
Cool brown dwarfs, the largest sample of spectroscopically confirmed white dwarfs (by far), and many other classes of unusual stars

The American Museum of Natural History hosts a nice video overview of SDSS science accessible to the general public.

The SDSS data have been made public in a series of data releases; the most recent is the Eighth Data Release, which includes the complete SDSS/SDSS-II data. It includes links to the flat fields in the Science Archive Server and to the catalogs and databases in the Catalog Archive Server.

SDSS-III builds on the legacy of the SDSS and SDSS-II to generate high-quality scientific data and to make important new discoveries. SDSS-III has been designed to maximize understanding of three scientific themes:

Dark energy and cosmological parameters
The structure, dynamics, and chemical evolution of the Milky Way
The architecture of planetary systems

For a detailed description of the SDSS-III's science program, see the Project Description, available as a PDF document. Also there is a recent overview paper now submitted for publication.