SDSS and the Astro2020 Decadal Survey
Image Credit: Juna A. Kollmeier and Hans-Walter Rix
In response to the call for white papers of the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020, SDSS submitted two papers in the category “Activity, Project, and State of the Profession Consideration (APC)”. These two papers can be accessed here:
- The Sloan Digital Sky Survey as an Archetypal Mid-Scale Program, Blanton et al., discusses recommendations for how to structure high-impact mid-scale programs based on the SDSS experience.
- SDSS-V Pioneering Panoptic Spectroscopy, Kollmeier et al., discusses the future of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys in the upcoming decade.
The figures of the second paper can be accessed in high-resolution below. For more information on SDSS-V, we refer to the overview paper (Kollmeier et al. 2017) and the SDSS Future webpage. Current members of SDSS-V are listed at the bottom of this page.
In addition, we highlight the following science white papers that have been submitted to Astro2020 and discuss the outlook for scientific fields relevant for the science programs of the current and future SDSS:
Stars, the Sun, and Stellar Populations
- Mass Spectroscopy of the Milky Way, Dey et al.
- Evolved Planetary Systems around White Dwarfs, Gaensicke et al.
- In Pursuit of Galactic Archaeology, Ness et al.
- Stellar Physics and Galactic Archeology using Asteroseismology in the 2020’s, Huber et al.
- The Origin of the Elements Across Cosmic Time, Johnson et al.
- Fundamental Astrophysics from Stellar Multiplicity: from Precision Calibrations to Re-Ionization and Gravitational Waves, Rix et al.
- Gravity-Wave Asteroseismology of Intermediate- and High-Mass Stars, Tkachenko et al.
- Understanding the evolution of close white dwarf binaries, Toloza et al.
Interstellar Medium and Star and Planet Formation
- Mapping Gas Phase Abundances and Enrichment Patterns Across Galaxy Disks, Kreckel et al.
- Making the Connection between Feedback and Spatially Resolved Emission Line Diagnostics, Pellegrini et al.
- High-Dimensional Dust Mapping, Zasowski et al.
Galaxies
Figures
The following figures are referenced in the SDSS-V: Pioneering Panoptic Spectroscopy white paper, by Kollmeier et al.
Figure 2: Schematic of the innermost regions around a quasar's central supermassive black hole (SMBH):} the X-ray corona, accretion disk, and broad-line region (BLR). SDSS-V explores the physics of SMBH accretion and dynamics with three parallel approaches: reverberation mapping, eROSITA follow-up, and multi-epoch spectroscopy (top three panels). Top left: an example of time delays (Pei et al. 2017) between UV/optical continua from the accretion disk and emission line flux from the BLR, which yields the BH mass. Top center: the eROSITA X-ray telescope that, combined with SDSS-V spectra, will conduct a census of the X-ray/optical properties for hundreds of thousands of unobscured and obscured quasars. Top right: multi-epoch spectra (Liu et al. 2014) that reveal a marked change in the broad-line profile for a quasar over a rest-frame time baseline of 8.3 years. This change, similar to those the BHM will provide for large numbers of quasars, is a probe of dynamical processes within the BLR.
Figure 3: The MWM footprint across the Milky Way and the Color-Magnitude Diagram:} The left panel shows the range of stellar types explored by MWM's numerous programs focused on galactic and stellar astrophysics, from the coolest and most luminous red giants across the Galaxy, to massive stars injecting energy into their local environment, to low-mass dwarfs and stellar remnants in the solar neighborhood. The right panel demonstrates the spatial extent of the Galactic Genesis sample, modeled with Galaxia (Sharma et al. 2011). The dense stellar sampling in the Milky Way midplane will enable contiguous chemo-dynamical mapping of stars in the inner bar/bulge, as well as the inner/outer and thin/thick disks, including on the far side of our Galaxy.
Figure 4: The LVM survey footprint on the MW (blue) is shown on top of the SDSS-V Milky Way Mapper target density map. Zooming into the Orion region we see an image of ionized emission sampled at the LVM spaxel size on the small 16cm telescopes (<0.1pc) and stars with SDSS-III, -IV, and -V spectroscopy in yellow. For the LMC we see a continuum plus ionized emission image of the 30 Doradus star forming region, sampled at the 10pc spaxel size of LVM on the 16cm telescope. The LVM will provide R~4000 spectra over the full optical window for every pixel in these images. The top panels show the LVM IFU field-of-view on the 1m telescope over a continuum image of M31. Statistical samples of HII regions (green) observed at 20pc resolution across M31 and at ~100pc resolution across other nearby galaxies, connect small scale physics and large scale galaxy evolution.
Figure 5: The SDSS-V Budget is constructed bottom-up from each of the 15 WBS elements. We further combine these into high-level sub-systems for ease of viewing.
