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IMAGE: Astronomers found a roaming comet taking a rest stop before possibly continuing its journey. The wayward object made a temporary stop near giant Jupiter. The icy visitor has plenty of. view more
Credit: Credits: NASA, ESA, and B. Bolin (Caltech)
After traveling several billion miles toward the Sun, a wayward young comet-like object orbiting among the giant planets has found a temporary parking place along the way. The object has settled near a family of captured ancient asteroids, called Trojans, that are orbiting the Sun alongside Jupiter. This is the first time a comet-like object has been spotted near the Trojan population.
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Hundreds of fibers, arranged by hand, capture light at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s New Mexico telescope. DAN LONG/APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY
Astronomy surveys aim to up the pace with army of tiny robots
Feb. 3, 2021 , 3:25 PM
It was one of the stranger and more monotonous jobs in astronomy: plugging optical fibers into hundreds of holes in aluminum plates. Every day, technicians with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) prepped up to 10 plates that would be placed that night at the focus of the survey’s telescopes in Chile and New Mexico. The holes matched the exact positions of stars, galaxies, or other bright objects in the telescopes’ view. Light from each object fell directly on a fiber and was whisked off to a spectrograph, which split the light into its component wavelengths, revealing key details such as what the object is made of and how it is moving.
By Jim Shelton
December 14, 2020
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A time-domain spectroscopic survey of quasars and X-ray sources. (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
After 20 years and four previous phases, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s Phase V(SDSS V) is ready to give Yale astronomers a new look at the wonders of the cosmos.
The survey’s mission is ambitious: It aims to create a detailed, three-dimensional map of the universe, using a 2.5-meter, wide-angle optical telescope located at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
Previous SDSS surveys have mapped one-third of the sky. SDSS data have been used in more than 7,700 peer-reviewed, scientific papers, offering insights into the chemical makeup of the Milky Way and the structure of distant galaxies. It has also helped produce multi-color imaging for hundreds of millions of stars, and gleaned information about 100,000 asteroids and other objects