Press Releases

Astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have created the first map of the large-scale structure of the Universe based entirely on the positions of quasars. Quasars are the incredibly bright and distant points of light powered by supermassive…

Earlier this month, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) reached an important milestone by opening its “second eye on the sky” – a new instrument called the “APOGEE South spectrograph.” This new instrument at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile is…

Earlier this month, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) reached an important milestone by opening its “second eye on the sky” – a new instrument called the “APOGEE South spectrograph.” A principios de este mes, el relevamiento digital del cielo…

Although nearly 30 percent of U.S. citizens are African-American, Hispanic, Pacific Islander or Native American, these groups make up only 4 percent of the astronomical community. This gap represents major lost opportunity, both for thousands of individual people and for…

To say “we are stardust” may be a cliche, but it’s an undeniable fact that most of the essential elements of life are made in stars. “For the first time, we can now study the distribution of elements across our…

What makes a rocky planet Earth-like? Astronomers and geoscientists have joined forces using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to study the mix of elements in exoplanet host stars, and to consider what this reveals about their planets.…

Astronomers announced this week the sharpest results yet on the properties of dark energy.

For most of their lives, galaxies are lush environments for turning gas into stars. Until they aren’t. Over the last few billion years, a mysterious kind of “galactic warming” has turned huge numbers of galaxies into deserts devoid of fresh young stars.

A new paper published this month in The Astronomical Journal by astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) reports a wellspring of new brown dwarf stellar companions, throwing cold water on the entire idea of the “brown dwarf desert,” the previously mystifying lack of these sub-stellar objects around stars.

You might think that astronomers could easily tell the difference between a black hole and a white dwarf – but nature can be deceptive.