CU joins Sloan Digital Sky Survey to map stars, galaxies and quasars in 3D
Jun 26th
The University of Colorado Boulder has become a full institutional member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-IV, an ambitious effort by some of the world’s top astronomers to map the celestial sky in three dimensions to learn more about the structure and evolution of the universe.
The survey, known as SDSS-IV, is the fourth stage of an effort that began with SDSS-I in 2000 to create the largest digital color image of the northern sky, said CU-Boulder Professor Michael Shull of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department, lead scientist in the effort by CU-Boulder to join the survey. Since 2000, astronomers have mapped about one-half of the visible northern sky in three dimensions as part of the three prior Sloan sky surveys, discovering nearly half a billion astronomical objects ranging from asteroids and stars to galaxies and distant quasars in the process.
“We got into this because we think it is going to be a great recruitment tool for new students, and we have one of the best undergraduate majors in the country,” Shull said. “We also want to recruit high-caliber graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.”
The SDSS 2.5-meter telescope is located at the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, N.M., and is owned by the Astrophysical Research Consortium, or ARC, an organization of eight research institutions including CU-Boulder. The Sloan telescope sky-mapping project is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the participating institutions, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Apache Point also hosts several other telescopes, including a 3.5-meter optical telescope owned and operated by ARC and routinely used by CU-Boulder.
ARC was formed in 1984 to create a national observatory that could provide telescope time to each member university based on its investment. Current ARC members in addition to CU-Boulder are the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the University of Washington, the University of Virginia and New Mexico State University. CU-Boulder owns a one-eighth share of each of the two telescopes.
The costs to build new instruments, make observations and analyze data from the SDSS-IV from 2014 to 2020 is estimated to be between $50 million and $60 million, said Shull. The Sloan Foundation is contributing roughly $10 million, while additional funds are coming from more than 10 full institutional members, including CU, and from scientists with individual and small group memberships from various institutions.
Full institutional partners like CU-Boulder are paying roughly $1 million to join part four of the Sloan sky survey effort. CU-Boulder’s member fee was supported by university grants, awards, donations, general funds and indirect cost recovery savings. As an early institutional partner joining the Sloan IV survey before the end of the current fiscal year, CU received a $350,000 discount from ARC, said Shull.
Light from the Sloan telescope is directed to two powerful new instruments — a dual-channel visible light, or optical spectrograph, and a near-infrared spectrograph. Astronomical spectrographs break light into telltale colors much like a prism, revealing information about the size, temperature, composition and motion of celestial objects, said Shull.
The Sloan spectrographs will carry out a massive survey of galaxies and quasars in the distant universe, as well as stars in the Milky Way and thousands of nearby galaxies, said Shull, who also is a member of CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.
The new optical spectrograph on the Sloan telescope can take data from up to 1,000 galaxies or quasars simultaneously, he said. The instrument includes a circular aluminum plate roughly the size of a large pizza pan with 1,000 small perforations precisely drilled to match up with known astronomical objects in the sky. Each hole is plugged with an optical fiber attached to the spectrograph.
“I think this is going to be a perfect way for undergraduates to get their hands dirty working with ‘big data,’ said Shull. “A lot of undergraduates are better at computers than we are, so hiring a freshman or a sophomore who really wants to get into computing and big data sets in the field of astronomy is one of our goals.”
One of the biggest discoveries by SDSS-III astronomers came in 2012 when they detected the predicted signature of the first sound waves from matter and radiation in the early universe, said Shull. Sloan researchers used a multi-fiber spectrograph as part of the Baryon Oscillation Sky Survey, or BOSS, to detect the large-scale structures of ancient galaxies — similar in some ways to ripples on a pond — that were preserved after the Big Bang.
Shull, who plans to use the multi-fiber spectrograph to hunt for distant quasars in the early universe going back 13 million years, said the BOSS effort also is expected to reveal new information about so-called “dark energy.” A hypothetical form of energy that makes up the majority of the universe and produces a force that opposes gravity, dark energy is thought to be the cause of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Another SDSS-IV effort will be a sky survey in the infrared to probe the distribution, dynamics and chemistry of stars and to explore the formation of our Milky Way Galaxy and its two companion galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, said Shull. Since the two Magellanic Clouds are best viewed from the southern hemisphere, SDSS scientists plan to collaborate with astronomers who are using the 2.5 meter du Pont Telescope at Las Campanas, Chile, on the effort.
SDSS-IV astronomers also will be using the BOSS instrument to study the internal structure of 10,000 nearby galaxies. The data will include precise velocities of stellar motions and chemical abundances for a large range of galaxy masses, types and environments. The data will complement observations of two newly completed American telescopes: the ALMA millimeter and submillimeter array radio telescope in Chile and the Expanded-Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico.
SDSS-IV also has had a significant citizen science component since 2007, when a data set of a million galaxies was released to the public, who were asked to classify them in three categories: Elliptical galaxies, merging galaxies and spiral galaxies, including the direction of the spiral arms. An astounding 70,000 classifications were received by SDSS scientists from the public within an hour of the data release, and during the first year more than 150,000 people made more than 50 million galaxy classifications.
CU has a legacy in space dating back nearly 70 years, said CU-Boulder Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. It is the top funded public university by NASA, has a $70 million instrument now flying on the Hubble Space Telescope, is leading a $485 million mission to Mars and controls four NASA satellites from campus.
A video news story on the project is available at http://youtu.be/1Rke59L5cAo.
-CU-
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Longmont man “missing” at Button Rock Reservoir
Jun 25th
The Longmont Police Department was notified that Reese Graba, a 23 year old male, had been missing from his Longmont home since Friday, June, 21, 2013. Reese’s vehicle was located at the trailhead for Button Rock Dam/Ralph Price Reservoir. The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, along with Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, Front Range Rescue Dogs, Boulder County Sheriff Mounted Patrol, Boulder Emergency Services, Longmont Emergency Unit, Lyons Fire Department, Longmont Rangers and Copters for a Cause conducted a search today in the area where the vehicle was found.
As of 6:00pm, today, Reese has not been found. The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office is planning to resume the search tomorrow morning.
Reese’s photo is attached to this press release. If anyone has seen Reese, please contact Longmont Police Detective Stephen Desmond at 303-651-8555 and reference Longmont Police case number 13-4967.
CU engineering students are now NASA rocket scientists
Jun 23rd
A Colorado student space research consortium led by the University of Colorado Boulder teamed up with a Virginia space consortium led by the University of Virginia this week to help aspiring rocket scientists from around the country learn how to design, build and fly payloads.
The program allowed more than 120 students and educators from around the country to delve into the world of rocket science June 15-21 during Rocket Week at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. All participants — including 10 CU-Boulder students — were present for a sounding rocket launch carrying various experiments developed by students that successfully lifted off June 20 at 5:30 a.m. EDT.
Activities during the week included a “RockOn!” workshop for 50 university and community college-level participants led by Chris Koehler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, or COSGC. RockOn! introduces participants to building small experiments that can be launched on suborbital sounding rockets and supports a national program known as STEM that uses classes in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to improve the nation’s competitiveness in technology.
“Working with NASA, we have developed a step approach to expand the skills needed for students to enter careers in STEM,” said Koehler of CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department. “RockOn! is the first step, followed by RockSat-C and then RockSat-X. Each step is technically more challenging than the previous one, allowing the students to expand the skills needed to support the aerospace industry.”
The RockOn! participants built standardized experiments that were launched Thursday on a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket. The 35-foot-tall rocket flew to an altitude of about 75 miles. After launch and payload recovery, the participants began conducting preliminary data analysis and discussing their results.
Nine custom-built Rocksat-C experiments, developed at universities that previously participated in a RockOn! workshop, also flew inside a payload canister on the rocket, said Koehler. About 50 students who designed and built the experiments attended Rocket Week.
Also attending were university participants in RockSat-X, said Koehler. They are previous Rocksat-C participants who flew six custom-built experiments aboard a sounding rocket from Wallops in August.
COSGC is a statewide organization involving 17 colleges, universities and institutions around Colorado and is funded by NASA to give students access to space through innovative courses, real-world, hands-on telescope and satellite programs, and interactive outreach programs, said Koehler.
COSGS is one of 52 space grant consortia in the nation — including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia — and is one of the most active, having flown scores of payloads on high-altitude balloons, sounding rockets and even space shuttles, giving thousands of undergraduates and graduate students a taste of space research since the program began in Boulder in 1989, said Koehler.
The week’s activities also included activities by the Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers and Students, or WRATS, for a high school audience. The rocket programs at Wallops continue NASA’s investment in the nation’s education programs by supporting the goal of attracting and retaining students in STEM disciplines critical to the future of space exploration.
The RockOn! and WRATS workshops are supported by NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program. RockOn! also is supported by NASA’s Office of Education and NASA’s National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia.
For more information on COSPG visit http://spacegrant.colorado.edu and for information about NASA’s education programs visit http://www.nasa.gov/education.
-CU-
