"THE UNIVERSE IN TEN TERABYTES:
SCIENTIFIC RESULTS FROM THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY"
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a multi-institutional
project to create a huge digital imaging and spectroscopic data bank of
25 percent of the sky in the optical and near-infrared. The imaging
atlas is in five specially-chosen colors, reaching a sensitivity 50 times
fainter than past similar work. This data base of 10 Terabytes (more
information than in the Library of Congress) is automatically analyzed
as it is acquired, to catalog the properties of 200 million stellar images,
galaxies, and color-selected quasar candidates. The images are used
to autonomously select targets for the spectroscopic survey, which will
include more than one million spectra of galaxies, previously-unknown quasars,
and very unusual stars. SDSS will impact virtually every field of
astronomy, from Earth-crossing asteroids to the most distant quasars.
The multi-color, precision calibrated imaging archive will be a world resource
for many decades. Numerous interesting results are found in the first
few percent of the data, including new discoveries of very rare objects
that overwhelm all past known examples, from the closest planet/brown dwarf
transition objects, to virtually all of the most distant known quasars.