High Redshift Quasar Discoveries

1
The results of the High Redshift Quasar findings
were reported in January 2003 in The Washington
Post (page 1), The New York Times, BBC News, the
International Herald Tribune, New Scientist,
Science, Nature and more than 30 domestic and
international news outlets.
High Redshift Quasar Discoveries
Scientific knowledge of the Universes genesis
was advanced with the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys
discovery of three, new high-redshift quasars.
These compact but luminous objects thought to be
powered by super-massive black holes reach back
to a time when the universe was just 800 million
years old. It took roughly 13 billion years for
light to reach us from the highest redshift
quasar discovered earlier this year in the
constellation Ursa Major. Lead investigator
Xiaohui Fanwas named the 2003 recipient of the
American Astronomical Societys Newton Lacy
Pierce Prize "for his systematic discovery of
high redshift quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey."
2
The Milky Way Ring findings were reported in
January 2003 in The Washington Post, USA Today,
New York Times, BBC Radio (live interview), CBC,
Space.com, New Scientist, Nature, National
geographic Channel, Scientific American.com, ABC
News.com, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and
more than 60 domestic and international media
outlets.
A Ring of shattered Galaxies around the Milky Way
A team of international scientists from the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey discovered a previously
unseen band of stars beyond the edge of the Milky
Way Galaxy. Hidden from view because it is behind
the stars and gas on the same visual plane as the
Milky Way, this ring could help to explain how
the Galaxy was assembled 10 billion years ago.
The ring of stars is probably the largest of a
series of similar structures being found around
the Galaxy.Sloan Digital Sky Survey investigators
believe that as smaller galaxies are pulled
apart, the remnants dissolve into streams of
stars around larger galaxies.
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Spectroscopic Survey Acquires Half a Million
Redshifts
This February Sloan Digital Sky Survey observers
took their 500,000th spectrum. Efficiency at
the telescope has continued to improve as
witnessed by 5,760 spectra being taken in a
single night early this year. The resultant map
is allowing scientist to study the 3D clustering
as a function galaxy parameters (elliptical vs.
spiral clustering is shown above), and to map out
even larger volumes of space with the LRG and QSO
(upper right) samples.