How SDSS Talked about Light for #IYL2015

This is a re-posting of the wrap-up article which appeared on the IYL2015 main blog.


 

2015 has been the International Year of Light.

As astronomers, here at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey everything we do is based on collecting light from cosmic objects. So we have been pleased to celebrate the International Year of Light, and especially the Cosmic Light Theme, supported by the IAU.cosmiclight_color_whitebgAs a small contribution to this celebration, every month in 2015 SDSS had a special blog post talking about the different ways we use light. Here’s a roundup of what we talked about through out the year.

In January we talked about How SDSS Uses Light to Study the Darkest Objects in the Universe. This blog post, by Coleman Krawcyzk and Karen Masters (both from the University of Portsmouth in the UK) with help from Nic Ross (Royal Observatory, Edinburgh) was about finding black holes by looking at the light from distant galaxies. Finding objects which are famous for not emitting any light, using light seems contradictory, but this article explains how the light created by the hot material falling onto a black hole can make these objects outshine the entire galaxy they live in.

Quasar

An artist’s rendition of a quasar created by Coleman Krawczyk (ICG Portsmouth). The image is drawn on a radial log scale with the central black hole 1 AU in size.

In February we wrote about How SDSS Uses Light to Measure the Distances to Galaxies. This of course was about the technique of measuring galaxy redshifts (ie. the shift of their light to longer wavelengths caused by the expansion of the Universe) by looking at absorption and emission lines in galaxy spectra and comparing their wavelength to the laboratory measurement. Edwin Hubble, and others, realised over 80 years ago, that this can be used to give distances to galaxies, as the amount of redshift increases with the galaxy’s distance. The original motivation for SDSS (back in the 1990s) was to used this technique to measure distances to a million galaxies, and in SDSS-IV we are continuing to use this in the eBOSS part of the survey, to map distances to ever more distant galaxies.

A map of the Universe from SDSS where the distance to galaxies is given in terms of their redshift. Credit: SDSS

A map of the Universe from SDSS where the distance to galaxies is given in terms of their redshift. Credit: SDSS

In March, we came back to the most local Universe, with a post by SDSS-IV Spokesperson, Jennifer Johnson (Ohio State University) on How SDSS Uses Light to Understand Stars Inside and Out in the Kepler Field. This was about part of the APOGEE survey, which is measuring spectra from stars which have light curves measured by the Kepler Satellite. This is a valuable experiment, as the combination of spectra and light curves allows us to measure the masses, ages and compositions of these stars.

The Kepler Field. Credit: NASA

The Kepler Field. Credit: NASA

In April, we moved back outside our own Galaxy, to measuring the invisible mass in other galaxies, with a post on How SDSS Uses Light to Explore the Invisible, by the MaNGA Lead Observer, and SDSS-IV Data Release Co-ordinator, Anne-Marie Weijmans from St Andrew University. This post talked about how MaNGA is measuring spectra across the face of nearby galaxies in order to get measurements of the internal motions (again using the redshift/blueshift of the spectra). These measurements give a way to measure the total mass of galaxies, which we find in all cases is much much more than the mass in stars.

MaNGAlogo5small

For May we went back in the history of SDSS, and talked about How SDSS Used Light to Make the Largest Ever Digital Image of the Night Sky. This post was about the the SDSS camera and the SDSS imaging survey, which ran from 2000-2008, and created a image of over 30% of the sky, containing over a trillion pixels (an image which dwarfs others that have also been claimed as the largest).

The SDSS Camera, now in storage in the Smithsonian Museum. Credit: SDSS, Xavier Poultney

The SDSS Camera, now in storage in the Smithsonian Museum. Credit: SDSS, Xavier Poultney

June also saw a post about SDSS imaging, and about an unexpected use for them, finding asteroids, in How SDSS Uses Light to Find Rocks in Space. This has been beautiful visualized in the below video, by Alex Parker.

If our posts in February, March and April confused you because you didn’t understand what astronomers mean by measuring spectra, then the July post was for you: “How SDSS Splits Light into a Rainbow for Science”.  This post explained all about what spectra are, how to create them with gratings, and contained a with bonus activity to make your own spectroscope created by the SDSS Education and Public Outreach group.

Comparison of the spectra obtained from a diffraction grating by diffraction (1), and a prism by refraction (2). Longer wavelengths (red) are diffracted more, but refracted less than shorter wavelengths (violet).Credit: Wikimedia

Comparison of the spectra obtained from a diffraction grating by diffraction (1), and a prism by refraction (2).Credit: Wikimedia

Our August post, by the APOGEE survey Public Engagement officer, David Whelan (from Austin College, Texas)  was about the basic physics of the most abundant element in the Universe (hydrogen): “How SDSS Uses Light to Study the Most Abundant Element in the Universe.”

For September, we visited an IYL2015 Exhibit in Dresden with Zach Pace, Graduate Student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Zach reported on SDSS plates on display in the exhibit, linking back to an earlier post in which we explain why we need all these big aluminium plates to do our spectroscopic survey. IYL2015 – SDSS Plates (in Retirement).

Technische_Sammlungen3

SDSS Plate on Exhibit in Dresden.

We went back to the APOGEE survey in October, with a post by Gail Zasowski (from John’s Hopkins University) on How SDSS uses mysterious “missing” light to map the interstellar medium. In this post we learned about how SDSS has helped shed light on the the mystery of missing light caused by absorption in the material which is found between stars in our own Galaxy.

Finally last month, we talked about How SDSS Uses Light to Measure the Mass of Stars in Galaxies. Looking back to the post in February, we claimed that the total mass of galaxies is always much much more than the mass we can count in their stars. But how do we know how much mass is in the stars in a galaxy? This post explains how that can be done using measurements of the light from galaxies.

So that wraps up a year of the celebration of light in the SDSS. We certainly haven’t covered all the ways in which SDSS astronomers are using light to learn about the Universe around us, from asteroids in the solar system, to stars in our own Galaxy and galaxies are the furthest edges of the Universe. But we hope it gives you a flavour for the kinds of things the light collected by SDSS (both images and spectra) can be used for.

If you’re looking for a guided entry into SDSS science (especially suitable for educational use), please visit our Voyages.sdss.org site to discover guided journeys through the Universe. As always all SDSS data (through our 12th public data release, DR12) is available free to download, and look out for DR13 (including the first data from SDSS-IV) coming up in mid 2016.

 

How SDSS Uses Light to Measure the Mass of Stars in Galaxies

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Galaxy NGC 3338 imaged by SDSS (the red stars to the right is in our own galaxy). Credit: SDSS

It might sound relatively simple – astronomers look at a galaxy, count the stars in it, and work out how much mass they contain, but in reality interpreting the total light from a galaxy as a mass of stars is fairly complex.

If all stars were the same mass and brightness, it would be easy, but stars come in all different brightnesses, colours and masses, with the lowest mass stars over 600 times smaller than the most massive.

Hertzsprung-Russel Diagram identifying many well known stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: ESO

Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) Diagram, which shows the mass, colour, brightness and lifetimes of different types of stars. This version identifies many well known stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: ESO

And it turns out that most of the light from a galaxy will come from just a small fraction of these stars (those in the upper left of the HR diagram). The most massive stars are so much brighter ounce for ounce than dimmer stars this makes estimating the total mass much more of a guessing game than astronomers would like (while they are 600 times more massive, they are over a million times brighter). So astronomers have to make assumptions about how many stars of low mass are hiding behind the light of their brighter siblings to make the total count.

One of the first astronomers to suggest trying to decode the light from galaxies in this way was Beatrice Tinsley. British born, raised in New Zealand, and working at Yale University in the USA, Dr. Tinsley had a much larger impact on extragalactic astronomy than her sadly shortened career would suggest (she died of cancer in 1981 aged just 40).

Stars of different masses have distinctive spectra (and colours), as first famously classified by Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon in the late 1890s into the OBAFGKM stellar sequence. O stars (at the top left of the HR diagram) are massive, hot, blue and with very strong emission lines, while M stars (at the lower right) are low mass, red and show absorption features from metallic lines in their atmospheres. With a best guess as to the relative abundance of different stars (something we call the “initial mass function“) a stellar population model can be constructed from individual stellar spectra or colours and fit to the total light from the galaxy. Example optical spectra of different types of stars are shown below (or see the APOGEE View of the IR Stellar Sequence)

Example optical spectra of different stellar types. Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF

Example optical spectra of different stellar types. Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF.

Using data from SDSS (and other surveys) astronomers use this methods to decode the galaxy light – in fact we can use either the total light observed through different filters in the SDSS imaging, to match the colours of the stars, or if we measure the spectrum of the galaxy we can fit a population of stars to this instead. While in principle the spectrum should give more information, in SDSS (at least before the MaNGA survey) we take spectra through a small fibre aperture (just 2-3″ across), so for nearby galaxies this misses most of the light (e.g. see below), and most galaxies have colour gradients (being redder in the middle than the outskirts), so the extrapolation can add quite a lot of error to the inferred mass.

NGC 3338 with the approximate SDSS fibre size overlaid (note this is an example of a very large galaxy imaged by SDSS). Credit: SDSS, KLM

NGC 3338 with the approximate SDSS fibre size (ie. the part of the galaxy for which we measured spectra) overlaid (note this is an example of a very large galaxy imaged by SDSS, and not representative of most galaxies). Credit: KLM, SDSS

 

Many astronomers prefer to use models based on the total light through different filters (at least for nearby galaxies). The five filters of the SDSS imaging are an excellent start for this, but extending into the UV with the GALEX survey, and IR with a survey like 2MASS or WISE adds even more information to make sure no stars are being missed. However, these fits are still a “best guess” and will still have error –  there is often more than one way to fit the galaxy light (e.g. model galaxies with certain combinations of ages and metallicities can have the same integrated colours), so there’s still typically up to 50% error in the inferred mass.

The SDSS camera filter throughput curves (from left to right ugriz). Credit: SDSS

The SDSS camera filter throughput curves (from left to right ugriz). Credit: SDSS

 

But with galaxies spanning more than 3 orders of magnitude in total mass (ie. the biggest galaxies have more than a 1000 times the stellar mass of the smallest) this is still good enough for many purposes. It gives us an idea of the total mass in stars in a galaxy, which (as you know from earlier post for IYL2015) is almost always way less than the total mass we estimate from looking at the dynamics (ie. the “gravitating mass”). And the properties of galaxies correlate extremely well with their stellar masses, so it’s a really useful thing to have even an estimate of.


This post by Karen Masters is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month in support of the celebration of light. 

How SDSS Uses Mysterious “Missing Light” to Map the Interstellar Medium

This post by Gail Zasowski is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month in support of the celebration of light. 


 

It is increasingly rare for modern astronomers to work on “old” puzzles — that is, older than they are, or especially older than their advisors are. The last several decades have seen a huge advancement in our understanding of the Universe — we learned that stars evolve over time in predictable ways, that the Milky Way is one distinct galaxy among many, and that the Universe itself is expanding and even accelerating in size “outwards”. Very often, the questions that astronomers work on now are new questions that arise as other problems are answered, or as we build new telescopes and discover things that we didn’t even know we didn’t know about.

But there is one outstanding puzzle that has famously resisted an answer for nearly a century now. This mystery concerns a peculiar pattern of missing light arising from interstellar material — that is, from the giant clouds of dust and gas that lie in the vast distances between stars. These clouds contain atoms and molecules of all the elements that make up the stars and the planets and us — hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on. They are 10^19 (that’s 10 000 000 000 000 000 000) times less dense than the air we breathe, but they are so huge that they contain enough atoms to add up to nearly 15% of the mass of the Galaxy! (Baryonic mass, of course — dark matter is a different story.) And now the SDSS has made some unique contributions to understanding the mystery in these clouds’ missing light.

Figure 1: The inner part of the Milky Way Galaxy, with numerous stars intermixed with giant clouds of interstellar gas and dust.  Image credit: Serge Brunier.

Figure 1: The inner part of the Milky Way Galaxy, with numerous stars intermixed with giant clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Image credit: Serge Brunier.

 

Some of the atoms and molecules in interstellar clouds emit light, like visible light or radio waves, that we can see with telescopes. But others don’t emit much light, and the only way we know they’re there is when they absorb some of the light of stars when the light passes through one of these interstellar clouds. Helpfully, each kind of atom or molecule absorbs only specific wavelengths of light, and we can measure these wavelengths in a laboratory to learn what the pattern is for each element or molecule. So when we look at the spectrum of one of these stars seen through a cloud, and we notice that some of the star’s light is missing, we can use the patterns of absorbed wavelengths to figure out what kind of atoms or molecules are in the cloud. For example, this is how we know that the clouds have elements like calcium and potassium in them1.

Okay, on to SDSS and the mysterious missing light! Way back in the late 1910s, astronomers started noticing some absorption patterns in their spectra that were very puzzling. They didn’t act like the patterns from atoms in the stars themselves, so they had to come from interstellar material. And they appeared in the spectra of stars all over the sky, so the material had to be something that was common. But they couldn’t figure out what the particles were! The patterns didn’t match those of anything we knew existed in interstellar clouds, or even anything we had measured in a laboratory.

Fast-forward nine decades, and the situation has progressed a bit, but not as much as one might expect. We now know of almost 500 separate absorption “features” (that is, wavelengths at which light is being absorbed by something), up from the original 2 discovered in the 1910s (Figure 2). We call all of these features “DIBs”, which stands for “Diffuse Interstellar Bands”2. We have determined that the DIBs are more consistent with being caused by molecules than by single atoms, and many people have theories as to which molecules those are. But it was just this year, in 2015, that scientists were first able to show conclusively that a particular molecule — the fullerene ion C60+ — is responsible for a particular DIB (actually, for four of them). The rest remain up for grabs!

Figure 2: The 400 strongest known DIBs.  The y-axis shows the typical fraction of background light absorbed when there is enough interstellar dust to absorb almost 60% of the total visible light.

Figure 2: The 400 strongest known DIBs. The y-axis shows the typical fraction of background light absorbed when there is enough interstellar dust to absorb almost 60% of the total visible light.

So where does SDSS come in? Well, proving that certain molecules produce certain DIBs requires a lot of equipment and a molecular spectroscopy laboratory, and that’s not really something SDSS is set up to do. But there’s another related puzzle — how are the molecules that produce the DIBs (whatever they are) distributed throughout the Milky Way? This is an important question, because the big molecules that are most likely to cause the DIBs are the kinds of molecules that contain a lot of the Galaxy’s carbon, which has an impact on things like the chemistry of newly formed planets. But because DIBs are generally only studied in small samples of stars very close to the Sun3, we didn’t have a good understanding of what the molecules were doing elsewhere in the Galaxy.

One group of SDSSers (led by Ting-Wen Lan, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins) tackled this issue by looking for the DIBs’ absorption signatures in optical SDSS spectra of other galaxies and quasars, seen through the Milky Way’s interstellar material. They had to be careful, because the galaxies’ and quasars’ spectra have absorption lines from their own stars and gas clouds, so identifying the weak features from the foreground Milky Way gas can be tricky. But the SDSS provides the biggest dataset available to look for DIBs: the team had so many spectra from SDSS-I, -II, and -III (almost 500,000 of them) that they could add many spectra together to boost the signal, and then map the DIB absorption strength on the sky (see the left side of Figure 3). Because they detected about 20 DIB features in each signal-boosted spectrum, they could also measure how each DIB behaves a little differently with respect to other interstellar gases, like hydrogen or carbon monoxide (Lan et al. 2015). This tells us that there isn’t one single molecule that can explain all of the DIBs!

However, the SDSS optical dataset doesn’t include any sources in the disk or inner parts of the Milky Way. This is because the interstellar material, which is concentrated in these parts of the Milky Way, is made up of not only gas particles but also dust grains (think of tiny soot particles). These dust grains block starlight, and block it much more than the DIB molecules do, especially at optical wavelengths. (Look back at the picture of the inner Milky Way in Figure 1.) So it is very hard to see any stars, galaxies, or quasars to use as “background” sources in which to look for DIBs.

Figure 3: Left: The strength of DIB absorption seen in optical wavelengths from SDSS background galaxies and quasars (Lan et al. 2015) and in infrared wavelengths with APOGEE (Zasowski et al. 2015).  Click HERE for an interactive version of this map!  Right: The motion of the APOGEE DIB molecules with respect to the Sun.  Image credit: T. W. Lan and G. Zasowski.  (HERE=http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~tlan/dibs-map.html)

Figure 3: Left: The strength of DIB absorption seen in optical wavelengths from SDSS background galaxies and quasars (Lan et al. 2015) and in infrared wavelengths with APOGEE (Zasowski et al. 2015). Click HERE for an interactive version of this map! Right: The motion of the APOGEE DIB molecules with respect to the Sun. Image credit: T. W. Lan and G. Zasowski.

And this is where APOGEE steps in. APOGEE is unique in the SDSS set of instruments because it measures light at infrared wavelengths. This kind of light is invisible to the human eye (we can perceive some infrared wavelengths ourselves, though we call it “heat”!), but it is very efficient at passing through some materials, including the interstellar dust that blocks visible light (Figure 4). This means that APOGEE is a great tool for measuring starlight — and the bits of it that get absorbed by the DIBs — very far from the Sun in the disk and bulge, where most of the stars and interstellar material are!

Figure 4: Looking at things with optical and with infrared light can lead to very different results!  On top, a plastic bag is opaque to visible light, but it is translucent to infrared light from the man's hand.  On the bottom, a similar effect occurs in an interstellar cloud, seen with visible light (left), like our eyes, and infrared light (right), like APOGEE.  Image credits: NASA/IPAC and ESO.  See more optical/IR comparisons HERE.  (HERE=http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_kids/learn_ir/)

Figure 4: Looking at things with optical and with infrared light can lead to very different results! On top, a plastic bag is opaque to visible light, but it is translucent to infrared light from the man’s hand. On the bottom, a similar effect occurs in an interstellar cloud, seen with visible light (left), like our eyes, and infrared light (right), like APOGEE. Image credits: NASA/IPAC and ESO. See more optical/IR comparisons HERE.

So I (Gail Zasowski, a postdoc at Johns Hopkins) led a second group of SDSSers who focused on a single, particularly strong DIB feature that APOGEE could detect. My team measured this feature in front of about 70,000 stars in the APOGEE dataset (Zasowski et al. 2015a). Because most of these stars lie in the dustiest parts of the Milky Way, we were able to fill in the parts of the DIB absorption map that Ting-Wen’s group couldn’t reach with optical data (left panel of Figure 3). We also found that, unlike many of the DIB features at visible wavelengths, this infrared DIB does not disappear in cold, dense interstellar clouds. This behavior means that the APOGEE DIB can be used to measure the approximate amount of interstellar material between us and a background star, including the amount of interstellar dust that blocks so much of the starlight.

Even more excitingly, my team is able to use the DIB features we detect to measure the speed at which the clouds of DIB molecules are moving with respect to the Sun. We can tell that the molecules are generally rotating with the Galactic disk in the same way that hydrogen and other major interstellar components do (right panel of Figure 3).  Since most DIB studies in the past have looked at stars relatively close to the Sun, this is the first time this dynamical behavior has been observed in any sort of large scale way.

My group even found evidence for DIB molecules flowing in the gas surrounding the beautiful Red Square Nebula (Figure 5). This detection may help us identify likely candidates for the molecule itself (Zasowski et al. 2015b).

Figure 5:  The Red Square Nebula.  Image Credit: P. Tuthill.

Figure 5: The Red Square Nebula. Image Credit: P. Tuthill.

Over the last hundred years, astronomers have learned that there is a large reservoir of unidentified, complex organic molecules in the interstellar medium, seen only in the mysterious signatures they leave in the light of stars shining through them. The SDSS has given us the ability to use these DIB features — even without knowing exactly what causes them! — to map the distribution and velocities of these molecules in the big spaces between the stars.


 

1 Some elements are also traced through their light emission, instead of light absorption. This has to do with the more complicated physics that happens in clouds with different densities and temperatures. For more information, check out http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/outreach/Edu/Spectra/spec.html, or search for “astronomical spectroscopy” online.

2This term refers to three facts about these features. Many of the features at optical wavelengths appear strongest in “diffuse” interstellar clouds, as opposed to very cold dense clouds with atoms packed more closely together (still very far apart by Earth standards, though). The “interstellar” part distinguishes them from absorption features coming from the atmospheres of stars. “Band” is used to indicate that the majority of the features appear broad in the spectrum of a background star — much broader than the narrow absorption lines coming from the star itself.

3This is because bright stars that are close to the Sun tend to have very few absorption lines coming from their own atmospheres, so it’s much easier to detect interstellar absorption lines.


This post by Gail Zasowski is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month in support of the celebration of light. 

IYL2015 Post: SDSS Plates (in Retirement!)

As part of Dresdner Lichtjahr 2015 [Dresden Year of Light 2015], you can now see a previously-used SDSS plate on display at Technische Sammlungen der Stadt Dresden, a museum located in a former Dresden factory. The exhibit will run through June of 2016, and has some really awesome demonstrations of how light propagates, and how much today’s technology depends on light.  Technische_SammlungenThe SDSS plate (below, designated plate 4385) is suspended above a table illustrating principles of how light propagates, what we can do with light of different wavelengths, and a demonstration of fiber optics. If you’re curious why our telescope might need need a metal plate, read this previous post.

Technische_Sammlungen2Used SDSS plates are available for educational purposes by schools, museums, astronomy clubs, and other educational & community organizations. Just contact someone at your nearest SDSS member institution to get started!

Technische_Sammlungen3Elsewhere in the exhibit and the museum, you can find a working infrared camera (selfie-compatible!), a very challenging puzzle involving prisms and laser light, and other neat activities suitable for children of all ages.

While you’re in Dresden, make sure to also stop by the Mathematische-Physikalische Salon [Royal Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments], at the Zwinger Palace in the center of Dresden, to have a look at old telescopes, clocks, and surveying tools. Of special interest to telescope enthusiasts are two very early reflector telescopes (i.e., telescopes that use a mirror to focus the incoming light, rather than lenses). You can also see them online in a panoramic view (upstairs in “Instruments of Enlightenment”).

 


This post is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month in support of the celebration of light. 

How SDSS Uses Light to Study the Most Abundant Element in the Universe

When we spread out the light from a source into a rainbow, we can reveal information about its chemical makeup. This is how we understand the spectral signatures that reveal that stars have different temperatures. But to learn about the objects that we study in space, whether they be stars, interstellar gas, or galaxies, we first have to know something about the chemical properties of the elements that make up these objects. And one of these elements is, by far, the most important to study: Hydrogen.

Why is hydrogen the most important element to study in astronomy? Primarily because it is the most abundant. If you count the number of hydrogen atoms in all of space (stars, gas, and galaxies), it can be shown that nine out of ten atoms in space are hydrogen. The second-most abundant is helium, which makes up almost one out of ten atoms in space, and every other element is present in only trace amounts — which is not to say that they are unimportant! But in this post, we are going to focus on the big one.

 

The Hydrogen atom, consisting of a single proton as the nucleus orbited by a single electron.

The Hydrogen atom, consisting of a single proton as the nucleus orbited by a single electron.

Hydrogen is also the simplest element on the Periodic Table, as the above diagram shows — one lone proton being orbited by one electron. And like all elements, hydrogen is able to absorb and emit light of certain wavelengths. If the electron is hanging out in the ground state (the n=1 state), it can absorb photons that will shimmy it to the n=2, n=3, n=4, etc. state (and there are an infinite number of these states). Likewise, if the electron begins in the n=2 state, then the atom can absorb photons of light to push it into the n=3, n=4, n=5, etc. state.

When a hydrogen atom is in one of these “excited” states (i.e., n 1), it also has the opportunity to emit a photon and travel back down to a lower energy level. The photons absorbed have the same wavelengths as the photons emitted, so that they always appear in the same place in a spectrum. In the following illustration, the first four energy levels of the hydrogen atom are shown. Three commonly-studied transitions between different energy levels are named, along with their absorption/emission wavelengths in units of Ångströms (= 10-10 m). The colors of the line are the approximate colors that they might appear to your eye — with the exception of the Lyman-α transition, which emits in the ultraviolet and is therefore invisible to the human eye.

An illustration of the four lowest energy levels of the Hydrogen atom, and commonly studied transitions between these energy levels.

An illustration of the four lowest energy levels of the Hydrogen atom, and commonly studied transitions between these energy levels.

 

When studying spectra from space, it is common to study either absorption spectra (spectra with lines that show that atoms are absorbing photons) or emission spectra (spectra with lines that show that atoms are emitting photons). The absorption process is the most common when studying stellar spectra. And for many stars, it is the hydrogen lines that gives us a first indication about the physical properties of the stars. Here, for instance, is the spectrum of an A-type star, i.e., one with strong Hydrogen absorption features:

Spectrum of an A0 star exhibits strong Hydrogen absorption lines where indicated. Other, smaller absorption lines are due to calcium, magnesium, and sodium absorption. This spectrum is taken from the Science Archive Server -- check it out!

Spectrum of an A0 star exhibits strong Hydrogen absorption lines where indicated. Other, smaller absorption lines are due to calcium, magnesium, and sodium absorption. This spectrum is taken from the Science Archive Server — check it out!

Galaxies, which are large conglomerations of stars, can also show hydrogen absorption features. But many galaxies, like spiral galaxies or else irregular galaxies with ongoing star formation, actually produce strong emission features. This is because the hydrogen gas that exists between the stars in these galaxies is heated by the stars, so that individual atoms are excited to higher energy levels. A great example is the spectrum of the irregular galaxy NGC 6052, shown below:

Spectrum of the irregular galaxy NGC 6052, with hydrogen emission lines labeled.

Spectrum of the irregular galaxy NGC 6052, with hydrogen emission lines labeled.

 

You might have noticed in this galaxy spectrum that these hydrogen emission lines appear to sit on top of what look like hydrogen absorption features. The absorption features, as mentioned above, come from the stars in the galaxy, whereas the emission features come from the gas between the stars.

There is other cool stuff that hydrogen can teach us. One of the coolest is called the Lyman-α Forest, which can be used to tell us how much hydrogen gas exists on large scales between galaxies.


This post is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month about how SDSS uses light in our mission to study the Universe. 

How SDSS Splits Light into a Rainbow for Science

All of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys currently active (APOGEE, eBOSS, MaNGA, Spider and TDSS) are spectroscopic surveys. A spectroscope is a scientific instrument, which splits light into a rainbow (or spectrum) in order to make precise measurements of the amount of light of different colours (or wavelengths). To date the SDSS collaborations have used three different spectroscopes (the SDSS, BOSS and APOGEE instruments) to measure the rainbow of light from millions of stars and galaxies in our mission to map the Universe. Below is an image of one of these spectrographs.

 

boss_spectrograph

The BOSS Spectrograph. In centre the instrument is shown with optical fibres plugged into it. The diagrams at the side show the path of the light through the instrument after it passes down the fibre. Different parts are labelled.This instrument you have made has many similarities to the BOSS spectroscope shown above.

It is possible to make your own spectroscope using simple household materials and use it to measure the spectra of common light sources.  Here are instructions to build an SDSS CD Spectropscope. This instrument you can make has many similarities to the BOSS spectroscope shown above. For example:

  1. You will construct a slit through which the light will pass. In the diagram of the BOSS spectroscope this is labeled “slit-head”, and the light from the optical fibres is collected, “collimated” (i.e. lined up) and passes though it.
  2. You will use an old CD to make a grating (the BOSS spectroscope has 4 gratings; 2 on each side, and sandwiched between prisms to make a “grism”). A typical CD is made with 625 lines per mm. The the BOSS spectrograph has 520 and 400 lines/mm for the blue and red sides respectively.

Your spectroscope will be sensitive to all visible light. In the BOSS spectroscope a “dichroic” is used to split the light into red and blue before passing it through the gratings. A dichroic has a special property that it is reflective to blue light, while red light passes through it. This means the light can be spread out more, and special cameras can be used to detect light from near ultraviolet, right across the visible rainbow to the near infrared.

Instead of a camera you will use your eye (or you could try using a camera lined up with the viewing window). In the BOSS spectroscope there are four cameras (two for blue and two for red light) each kept specially cold in a “dewer”.

When the light passes through the slit it gets spread out a little bit, and then when it passes through the CD, the very fine slits in it (the diffraction grating) spread it out more. Different colours are spread out (or “dispersed”) by different amounts. The angle of dispersion is set by both the wavelength (colour) of the light, and the line spacing on the diffraction grating. The below image illustrates this (compared to refraction which can also create spectra; this is the physics which creates natural rainbows from refraction in raindrops). The diffraction angle increases with wavelength (and decreases with the line spacing).

Comparison of the spectra obtained from a diffraction grating by diffraction (1), and a prism by refraction (2). Longer wavelengths (red) are diffracted more, but refracted less than shorter wavelengths (violet).Credit: Wikimedia

Comparison of the spectra obtained from a diffraction grating by diffraction (1), and a prism by refraction (2). Longer wavelengths (red) are diffracted more, but refracted less than shorter wavelengths (violet).Credit: Wikimedia

Here are some examples of the kind of spectra you should be able to take with your CD spectroscope.

Example spectra through a CD spectroscope. Credit: CoolStuff Newsletter

Example spectra through a CD spectroscope. Credit: CoolStuff Newsletter

To make precise measurements we don’t tend to look at a pretty image of a rainbow, but instead make a graph which shows the brightness as a function of the wavelength (colour). An example of this is shown below which is a typical spectrum of a galaxy shown at five different distances (or redshifts).

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The spectrum of a galaxy shown at five different distances (or redshifts), z=(0.0, 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20) corresponding to distances of (6, 12, 18 and 21 hundred million light years). Credit: SDSS Skyserver

If you do make an SDSS CD Spectroscope please take a picture (either of it or through it) and share it with us on Twitter or Facebook.


 

This post is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month about how SDSS uses light in our mission to study the Universe. 

How SDSS Uses Light to Find Rocks in Space

It’s an exciting time in solar system exploration, with the Philae lander and Rosetta orbiter exploring Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, sending back our most details view ever of a comet. On top of this the New Horizons Mission is approaching the dwarf planet Pluto, and will make its closest pass on 15th July 2015, sending back the highest resolution images of Pluto we have ever seen.

You might think that the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has nothing to say about rocks in space, but you’d be wrong. One of the possibly unexpected discoveries from our  imaging survey has been that of many hundreds of thousands of asteroids.

Because of the way the SDSS Camera Worked, asteroids show up in the SDSS imaging at different times (and therefore different places as they are moving across the sky) in the different filters. This makes them pop out as little strings of almost traffic light coloured dots. These have been popular finds by citizen scientists at Galaxy Zoo as well as identified by computer algorithms.

Asteroids (the three coloured dots) found near galaxies by citizen scientists at Galaxy Zoo.

Asteroids (the three coloured dots) found near galaxies by citizen scientists at Galaxy Zoo.

The below animation by Alex Parker shows the orbital motions of over 100,000 of the asteroids observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), with colors illustrating the compositional diversity measured by the SDSS five-color camera. The relative sizes of each asteroid are also illustrated.

 

All main-belt asteroids and Trojan asteroids with orbits known to high precision are shown. The animation has a timestep of 3 days. The fact that the composition of asteroids in the asteroid belt varys systematically is clearly visible, with green Vesta-family members in the inner belt fading through the blue C-class asteroids in the outer belt, and the deep red Trojan swarms beyond that.

Occasional diagonal slashes that appear in the animation are the SDSS survey beams.

The average orbital distances of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter are illustrated with rings.

Colors represented with the same scheme as Parker et al. (2008). Concept and rendering by Alex H. Parker. Music: Tamxr by LJ Kruzer.


This post is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month about how SDSS uses light in our mission to study the Universe. We’ve reached the halfway point here in June 2015! 

How SDSS Used Light to Make the Largest Ever Image of the Night Sky

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaged over 30% of the sky between the years of 1998-2008, creating the largest digital colour image of the sky ever taken. To view all of the SDSS imaging at once, would require 500,000 HD televisions (so it can be displayed at full resolution), and with more than a trillion pixels, this image dwarfs the 1.5 billion pixel image that NASA recently claimed was the biggest ever taken.

The SDSS Camera which took all of this imaging is now retired, and was collected by the Smithsonian Institution, to be packed away in a basement as an “artifact of scientific significance”.

The SDSS Camera in its current home - a basement of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Image Credit: Xavier Poultney, SDSS.

The SDSS Camera in its current home – a basement of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Image Credit: Xavier Poultney, SDSS.

The SDSS camera was made by arranging together an array of thirty, 2048×2048 pixel CCD chips. In the 1990s this was state-of-the-art, and even today a 126 Megapixel camera is nothing to sniff at (e.g the current state-of-the-art is DECam which has 62 CCDs and a total of 520 Megapixels).

The CCD chips in the SDSS camera were aligned in five columns, each covered by one of the five filters used to make the colour imaging (the u-, g-, r-, i- and z-bands, roughly corresponding to collecting light in the near-ultraviolet, green, red, near-infrared and a bit less near-infrared respectively).

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An illustration of the arrangement of the CCDs and filters on the camera. The filters from top to bottom are r, i, u, z and g-band. Image credit: SDSS.

This arrangement meant that the camera could take images continuously as the Earth rotated and moved it with respect to the sky overhead. SDSS images are therefore arranged in long stripes of constant Declination across the sky (the most famous being “Stripe 82” which was imaged many times). You can make out some of these stripes around the edges of the stitched together image (the “legs of the orange spider” below).

Orange Spider! This illustration shows the SDSS imaging on many scales. The picture in the top left shows the SDSS view of a small part of the sky, centered on the galaxy Messier 33 (M33). The middle and right top pictures are further zoom-ins on M33. The figure at the bottom is a map of the whole sky derived from the SDSS image. Visible in the map are the clusters and walls of galaxies that are the largest structures in the entire universe. Figure credit: M. Blanton and SDSS

All SDSS imaging is publicly available and can be explored online via the SDSS Skyserver. The Navigate Tool is especially fun as you can scroll around the entire image.

A much more technical description of the camera can be found in Gunn et al. (1998) and in the SDSS-I project book.


This post is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month about how SDSS uses light in our mission to study the Universe. 

How SDSS uses light to see dark matter in galaxies

Some of the most beautiful pictures taken by telescopes are those of galaxies. Containing billions of stars, they come in many shapes and sizes. We can study the stellar structures in galaxies from telescope images to learn more about the ways that galaxies form and evolve. We also can look at gas and dust features in galaxies, and the role that these play in the formation of new stars.

Elliptical galaxy NGC 4636 (left) and spiral galaxy M81 (right), as seen by the Sloan Telescope. The telescope captures the light of the stars, and in M81 we can also see some dust in the spiral arms. Both galaxies reside in large, invisible, dark matter haloes.

Elliptical galaxy NGC 4636 (left) and spiral galaxy M81 (right), as seen by the Sloan Telescope. The telescope captures the light of the stars, and in M81 we can also see some dust in the spiral arms. Both galaxies reside in large, invisible, dark matter haloes.

Yet, the largest and most massive component of a galaxy, the dark matter halo, is truly invisible. Dark matter is not made out of ‘normal material’ or baryons, which are the building blocks of stars, planets and all other matter surrounding us. Instead, dark matter is thought to be an exotic particle that does not emit or absorb any light: it does not interact with the electromagnetic force like normal matter. So how do we then know that the dark matter is there?

The answer lies in the light that we observe from the stars and the gas in galaxies. With images we capture the presence of light, but with spectrographs we unravel the light into different colours or wavelengths. The resulting galaxy spectra show us how the stars are moving around in the galaxy. In most galaxies, the stars will rotate around the centre of the galaxy, and this rotational velocity can be seen in the spectrum by a shift in the stellar absorption lines. This shift results from the Doppler Effect, which causes the lines of stars that move away from us to shift towards the red part of the spectrum, while the lines of stars that are moving towards us shift to the blue part of the spectrum. This way, we can find out how fast the stars in a galaxy are rotating around the galaxy centre. But there is more information in the spectrum: the lines are not infinitely thin, but are slightly broadened. This broadening is called ‘velocity dispersion’ and is caused by the additional random motions of the stars. With the new Sloan Survey, MaNGA, we are measuring the rotational and random motions of the stars in 10,000 galaxies. And because MaNGA is an integral-field spectrograph, we can map these motions not only in the very centre of the galaxies, but also in their outskirts, as shown below.

MaNGA is an integral-field spectrograph, capturing spectra at multiple points in the same galaxy with a fiber bundle. The bottom right illustrates how each fiber will observe a different section of the galaxy. The top right shows data gathered by two fibers observing two different part of the galaxy, showing how the spectrum of the central regions differs dramatically from outer regions. From these spectra, we measure the rotational and random motions of stars, to deduce how much dark matter is present in the galaxy. Image Credit: Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital Inc., David Law, and the SDSS collaboration

How do these velocity and dispersion maps help us to find the dark matter? The answer is gravity. The stars are moving around in a galaxy under the influence of gravity: the more matter (mass) there is in the galaxy, the faster the stars are moving. Now that we have measured the movements of the stars in the galaxies, we can deduce how much matter is needed to have the stars move around with those measured velocities. And we can compare that gravitational mass with the luminous mass in the galaxy (the stars, gas and dust). For all galaxies studied so far, the gravitational mass is much larger than the luminous mass: hence the need for dark matter.

Example of a galaxy observed with MaNGA. Left is the image of the galaxy, showing the stellar light. The middle image is the rotational velocity field of the galaxy: the red part of the galaxy is moving away from us with 254 km/s, and the blue part of the galaxy is moving towards us with the same velocity. The green axis down the middle is the rotation axis. The right image shows the random motions of the stars: these are higher in the centre (red: 257 km/s) than in the outskirts of the galaxy (blue: 94 km/s). Figure taken from Bundy et al. 2015.

Example of a galaxy observed with MaNGA. Left is the image of the galaxy, showing the stellar light. The middle image is the rotational velocity field of the galaxy: the red part of the galaxy is moving away from us with 254 km/s, and the blue part of the galaxy is moving towards us with the same velocity. The green axis down the middle is the rotation axis. The right image shows the random motions of the stars: these are higher in the centre (red: 257 km/s) than in the outskirts of the galaxy (blue: 94 km/s). Figure taken from Bundy et al. 2015.

Sophisticated mass or dynamical models of the galaxies, based on the observed velocity and dispersion maps, tell us how the luminous and dark matter are distributed in the galaxy, and what the properties (mass, size, concentration) of the dark haloes are. Comparing these mass models with predictions from galaxy formation theories will help us forward in our quest to understand galaxies, and the dark haloes that surround them. But it all starts with capturing the stellar light of galaxies in spectrographs, to map the invisible.


This post was written by Dr. Anne-Marie Weijmans (St Andrews) and is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month about how SDSS uses light in our mission to study the Universe.

How SDSS Uses Light to Understand Stars Inside and Out in the Kepler Field

Stars are not only fascinating objects in their own right — they also help us understand the history of our Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy was created as dark matter’s pull brought gas together, and the gas formed stars and planets. As part of the APOGEE survey, we wish to map the Milky Way’s star formation throughout cosmic time. As stars died, many of the elements they fused in their interiors during their lives or death throes are mixed back into the remaining gas, changing its composition and the composition of subsequent generations of stars and providing the raw materials for planets (and humans!) and we are exploring this chemical history as well.

A small part of the spectra of a few of the stars observed by APOGEE. The dark lines are caused by absorption of atoms in the star's atmosphere (or sometimes the Earth's). A few of them are highlighted. The bright lines are caused by emission in the Earth's atmosphere ("night sky lines") These particular stars have also been observed by the Kepler satellite.

A small part of the spectra of a few of the stars observed by APOGEE. The dark lines are caused by absorption of atoms in the star’s atmosphere (or sometimes the Earth’s). A few of them are highlighted. The bright lines are caused by emission in the Earth’s atmosphere (“night sky lines”) These particular stars have also been observed by the Kepler satellite.

APOGEE studies stars by passing their infrared light through gratings that spread the light out in wavelength (think infrared rainbows). We do this for > 250 stars at once (one of the reasons why the APOGEE instrument is fantastic). We can tell a lot about stars from studying these spectra. For example, in an earlier blog post, we discussed how we can tell the surface temperature of stars from such data. Another very important property is the composition of the star, for example, how many atoms of iron, calcium, or oxygen it has relative to hydrogen. The image to the left shows a small part of the spectra we gathered for stars that were also observed by the Kepler satellite. The stars do not give off the same amount of light at each wavelength (=color) of light. Instead, there are many dark lines, which are created when atoms in a star’s atmosphere absorb light at very particular wavelengths. Each element has a different pattern of these absorption lines, and by measuring the depth of these lines (+ additional information and math), we can determine the composition of the gas out of which the star formed.

But this doesn’t tell us everything about the star! In particular, we can’t see inside the star where the original composition of the gas is being transformed from hydrogen into helium as the star ages. We have a good idea of how long it takes for a star with a certain mass and original chemical composition to run out of fuse-able hydrogen in its center (about 10 billion years in the case of a star with the mass and composition of the Sun). When that happens, the star undergoes a dramatic change, turning into a red giant or supergiant. So if we can determine the mass to go with the spectral  composition information for red giants that we observe, we can determine the age of those particular stars.

Measuring the mass of a star is hard work, but one possible technique is to use asteroseismology, which is the study of the waves that move through stars. In the outer parts of stars, these waves are actually sound waves that can evocatively be described as ringing the star like a bell (For more information see The Song of the Stars). The motions of these waves cause a star’s brightness to change by small amounts, and thus the frequency of these waves can be measured by studying the lightcurves of red giant stars. The Kepler satellite, in addition to studying many Sun-like stars looking for transiting planets, also measured the brightnesses over many years of thousands of red giants. The favorite frequencies of waves in different stars have been measured by members of the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium. While much can be learned about the insides of stars from these data, we are particularly intrigued by the fact that how long and at what speed waves can move through the star depends on the star’s density and therefore (with some more math) its mass!

Combining together spectra from APOGEE and lightcurves from Kepler therefore gives us a way to figure out the ages of red giant stars in our Galaxy by measuring the masses and composition of stars that have just exhausted their hydrogen. In conclusion, songs and rainbows are good things.

This post is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month about how SDSS uses light in our mission to study the Universe. 

How SDSS Uses Light to Measure the Distances to Galaxies

Here at the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys our mission is to explore and map the Universe, from planets to the edges of the observable Universe. The way we do this is to collect light from specially selected objects we see in the night sky – but we can’t visit them in order to measure how far away they are. So how do we actually know how far away they are in order to make a map of the Universe?

Measuring the distance to objects in the Universe has always been one of the biggest challenges for astronomers. Until we know the distance to something we cannot really understand its physical properties, and the history of astronomy is full of examples where new techniques for measuring distances opened up entirely new areas of study. For example when the “spiral nebulae” were first discovered there was a long debate over if they were small clouds of gas in our own Galaxy, or external galaxies in their own right each made up of millions or billions of stars. Only by measuring their distances was this finally settled, and our understanding of the size of the Universe suddenly jumped many orders of magnitude.

A collection of "spiral nebulae". But how can we tell that they are distant galaxies rather than nearby gas clouds? Credit: SDSS

A collection of “spiral nebulae”. But how can we tell that they are distant galaxies rather than nearby gas clouds? Credit: SDSS

There’s some really useful bits of physics we can use to help measure distances to the galaxies from their light. To do this we need to understand spectroscopy. Once SDSS had finished imaging more than a quarter of the sky with its camera, it became entirely focused on “spectroscopic” surveys. Our telescope in New Mexico collects the light from stars and galaxies and uses instruments called spectroscopes to split it up into its different colours (we actually have two different spectroscopes working right now – the APOGEE spectroscope and the BOSS spectroscope). These measurements split the light into a rainbow (or a spectrum), and we look for the precise colours of series of emission and/or absorption lines to tell us all sorts of things about the light source we’re looking at.

Spectral_lines_en

A hot bright light source (like a star) will have a “continuous spectrum” (with the peak colour depending on its temperature – hot things glow red, even hotter things glow white or blue hot). If the light from that passes through a cool cloud of gas before we measure it, that will create “absorption lines” where very specific colours (or “wavelengths” in proper scientific terms) are absorbed by atoms in the gas cloud. The exact pattern of colours/wavelengths which are absorbed tell you which atoms are in the gas cloud. If the gas cloud gets heated up enough we might instead see emission lines – at the same specific colours, where the atoms are now re-emitting these very specific colours/wavelengths. Each atom has a very distinctive pattern of lines it emits – for example hydrogen (the most abundant element in the Universe) has a very distinctive and bright emission/absorption line in the red part of the spectrum (at a wavelength of 656.3nm).

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Emission spectrum of hydrogen in visible light (wikimedia commons)

Astronomers have been using this technique to work out the materials which make up the Sun and other stars for decades. It’s not always easy (it has been compared to trying to reconstruct a piano from the noise it makes falling down the stairs), but it works. When astronomers first used the technique to look at galaxies however they were very surprised by what they found. The patterns of lines seemed to be in completely the wrong places – for example the famous hydrogen lines weren’t even visible in some cases – they had moved right into the infra-red part of the spectrum.

In order to understand why this could happen we need to learn about another part of physics – the Doppler effect. First proposed in 1842, by a Physicist named Christian Doppler this is the observation that when a source emitting a wave is moving, the waves are shortened if the source is moving towards the observer, and lengthened if it is moving away. Most people are familiar with this effect when they have listened to ambulance sirens passing them on the street; the siren is higher in pitch when the ambulance is moving towards you and lower when it’s moving away (when sound waves are lengthened the pitch drops, and when they are shortened the pitch rises).

Wikimedia commons illustration of the Doppler effect.

Since light is a wave, the same effect happens when light is emitted from a moving source. When the waves of light are shortened the light becomes bluer, and when they are lengthened the light becomes redder.

An astronomer named Vesto Slipher, was the first person to try this out on galaxies, and he found that almost all galaxies he looked at showed enormous “redshifts”, implying that almost all the galaxies were moving away from the Earth at very high speeds.

Edwin Hubble is given the credit for explaining this observation by realising that we live in a Universe which is constantly expanding. In such a Universe any observer will observe almost all other galaxies moving away from them. Hubble published the first description of a relationship between how fast galaxies appear to be moving away from us (their “redshifts”) and their distances – this relationship is now called Hubble’s Law.

It is this relationship that we use to measure the distances to the galaxies from detailed observations of the light they emit, and astronomers are now used to describing the distances to galaxies as simply their “redshift”.

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A map of the Universe from SDSS where the distance to galaxies is given in terms of their redshift. Credit: SDSS


This post is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month about how SDSS uses light in our mission to study the Universe.


How SDSS uses light to study the darkest objects in the Universe

Black holes are intriguing objects. A black hole is a phenomenon whose gravity is so strong that not even light, the fastest traveller in the Universe, can escape from its influence. Once thought mere oddities due to their extreme properties, today, black holes are found to be vital in the formation and lives of galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

But how do we know black holes exist if we can’t see them? Well, even if we can’t see a black hole directly we can observe their influence and indeed the energy and light emitted as gas, dust and stars fall into a black hole; that is, we can see black holes when they are actively “eating” material.  When the supermassive black hole, which can be up to a billion times more massive than our Sun, at the center of a galaxy starts to eat new material the resulting process is so bright it can be seen out to ~200 billion lightyears away.  Astronomers call the observational result of this process either an active galactic nuclei, or in the most extreme examples a “quasar”. So you might be surprised to find that an object that emits no light can cause the brightest known phenomenon in the Universe!

Quasar

An artist’s rendition of a quasar created by Coleman Krawczyk (ICG Portsmouth).  The image is drawn on a radial log scale with the central black hole 1 AU in size.

The light of quasars is not produced by the black hole itself, but instead it comes from the material, mostly gas, that is falling into the black hole.  Different types of light are produced by this material at different distances outward from the black hole.  Near the surface (or horizon) of the black hole (about the distance of the Earth’s orbit away for supermassive black holes in galaxies) this gas becomes extremely hot and produces X-rays. Stretching out from this to fill a region about the size of our Solar System, a disk of gas shaped like a frisbee is formed.  The inside of this disk is closer to the black hole than the outside, so it rotates faster causing friction within the disk.  This friction causes the gas to heat up and glow, producing light in the optical to ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

From the edge of the gas disk to a distance of about 3 light years (similar to the distance from the Sun to the next closest star), the temperature becomes low enough that particles of “interstellar dust”, made of carbon and silicon, form.  These dust clouds form what is know as the “dusty torus,” a donut shaped ring round the gas disk. Some of the light coming from the gas disk is absorbed by the dust and re-emitted at longer wavelength infrared light. At very large distances from the black hole, some quasars have radio jets coming out along the poles.  As the name suggests, this jets produce light at radio wavelengths cased by electrons being accelerated along a strong magnetic field.  When these jets are present they can be up to ~300 thousand lightyears (~3 times the diameter of our entire galaxy!) in size.

Not only can a black hole produce light, it can create light at all wavelengths from the radio up to the X-ray, and across an area stretching from the size of the Earth’s orbit out to distances larger than the Milky Way.  Therefore, growing black holes, and the regions around them are anything but “black.”

With discoveries from its earliest imaging campaigns, the SDSS extended the study of quasars back to the first billion years after the Big Bang, showing the rapid early growth of black holes and mapping the end stages of the epoch of reionization.

Stacked spectra of more than 46,000 quasars from the SDSS; each spectrum has been converted to a single horizontal line, and they are stacked one above the other with the closest quasars at the bottom and the most distant quasars at the top. Credit: X. Fan and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Stacked spectra of more than 46,000 quasars from the SDSS; each spectrum has been converted to a single horizontal line, and they are stacked one above the other with the closest quasars at the bottom and the most distant quasars at the top.
Credit: X. Fan and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

With full quasar samples hundreds of times larger than those that existed before, the SDSS has given us the most accurate descriptions of the growth of black holes over cosmic history.  SDSS spectra show that the properties of quasars have changed remarkably little from the early universe to the present day.

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Growth in the number of known quasars in the largest homogeneous (solid) and heterogeneous (dashed) quasar catalogs as a function of time. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey catalogues started being produced in 2000. Fig. 1 from Richards et al. (2009).

SDSS studies have probed the dark matter environments of quasars through clustering measurements, revealed populations of quasars whose central engines are hidden by obscuring dust, captured changes in quasar spectra that show clouds moving in the gravitational grip of the central black hole, and allowed a comprehensive census of the much fainter accreting black holes (active galactic nuclei, or AGN) in present-day galaxies.
This, our first post for the IYL2015 is a collaboration between Coleman Krawcyzk (ICG Portsmouth); Nic Ross (ROE) with help from Karen Masters (ICG Portsmouth).

This post is part of the SDSS Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015, in which we aim to post an article a month about how SDSS uses light in our mission to study the Universe. 

SDSS Celebrates the International Year of Light 2015

As astronomers, at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey everything we do is based on collecting light from cosmic objects. SDSS is therefore pleased that in 2015 we are celebrating the International Year of Light, and we especially would like to point out the Cosmic Light Theme, supported by the IAU.cosmiclight_color_whitebg

As a small contribution to this celebration, every month in 2015 SDSS will have a special post on here talking about the different ways we use light. Our first post, which will appear before the end of January will be about how we use light to study black holes, something which seems like a contradiction, but has taught us a lot!

This post will be updated to collect all the links as the year progresses: