Press Releases

Colored dots - blue on the left, green in the middle, and red to the right - over a screenshot from an animation of the Milky Way

Largest Age Map of the Milky Way Reveals How Our Galaxy Grew Up

Proud parents chart the growth of their children, but astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have taken on a bigger task: charting the growth of our own Milky Way.

A glowing quasar with gas beginning to shut off, with its spectrum superimposed

The Case of the Missing Quasar

Astronomers can’t find any sign of the black hole at the center of the quasar SDSS J1011+5442, and they couldn’t be happier.

Stars in Our Galaxy Move Far From Home

When it comes to our galaxy, home is where the star is. Scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have created a new map of the Milky Way and determined that 30 percent of stars have dramatically changed their orbits.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Opens a New Public View of the Sky

Today, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) issues its latest public data release, the final release of the third epoch of the survey (SDSS-III). Weighing in at more than 100 Terabytes, “Data Release 12” (DR12) contains measurements of the properties…

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Expands Its Reach

Building on 14 years of extraordinary discoveries, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has launched a major program of three new surveys, adding novel capabilities to expand its census of the Universe into regions it had been unable to explore…

A light wave leaves each of three quasars and travels to the Sloan Fondation Telescope (bottom left). Two white lines show the distance from the quasars to the ring patterns surrounding them.

Astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Make the Most Precise Measurement Yet of the Expanding Universe

Astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have used 140,000 distant quasars to measure the expansion rate of the Universe when it was only one-quarter of its present age. This is the best measurement yet of the expansion rate at any epoch in the last 13 billion years.

A drawing illustrating BAOs - galaxy clusters are surrounded by gray circles, with more galaxies along the circles; a single white line marks the radius of one of the circles

A One-Percent Measure of the Universe

Researchers from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) today announced that they have measured the distances to galaxies more than six billion light-years away to an unprecedented accuracy of just one percent.

A map of the Milky Way with spectra from Data Release 10

This is your galaxy: New data help astronomers explore the hidden Milky Way

Today, astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) released a new online public data set featuring 60,000 stars that are helping to tell the story of how our Milky Way galaxy formed.

A color drawing of the Milky Way galaxy with long red arrows pointing out of the central bar.

So these stars orbit in a bar…

Forget the restaurant at the end of the Universe — astronomers now have the clearest understanding yet of the bar at the center of the Milky Way. Scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) have announced the discovery of hundreds of stars rapidly moving together in long, looping orbits around the center of our Galaxy.

An illustration contained in a purple rectangle. At the left edge of the rectangle are many red and yellow dots. Thin lines come out of the dots to the right. The lines pass through a slice of intergalactic gas shown as a purple-and-gold colored rectangle.

The Great Space Coaster: Astronomers measure the Universe’s deceleration before dark energy took over

Thanks to a new technique for measuring the three-dimensional structure of the distant Universe, astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) have made the first measurement of the cosmic expansion rate just three billion years after the Big Bang.