Science Results

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 Ninth Data Release, which includes the complete SDSS/SDSS-II data. It includes links to the flat files 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 published in Astronomical Journal (see also the arXiv preprint).