An ambitious survey striving to measure the chemical properties and velocities of a million Milky Way stars released its first results on Friday.
By 31 January, the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) had studied more than 84,000 stars in the southern hemisphere, collecting information that may one day help scientists understand how our galaxy formed in the early universe.
International scientists in the RAVE collaboration used the 1.2-metre UK Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory located at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. They also used a special 鈥渟ix degree field鈥� spectrograph to gather information about as many as 150 stars at once. The spectrograph covers an area of the sky one hundred times larger than most spectrographs can handle.
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In its first public data release, RAVE has provided details of 25,000 stars studied during its inaugural year. New radial velocities describing the speed with which those stars are moving toward or away from Earth are included in the first batch of results. The new data is accompanied by measurements of brightness, colour and motion across the sky from other star surveys, such as the European Space Agency鈥檚 Tycho-2 survey.
Chemicals to follow
Future annual RAVE releases will include chemical information about the stars, says Matthias Steinmetz, leader of the collaboration and director of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, Germany.
鈥淭he full RAVE survey will provide a vast resource of stellar motions and chemical abundances, allowing us to answer fundamental questions of the formation and evolution of our Galaxy鈥�, he says.
The project currently has funding that will carry it into 2008, Steinmetz told 快猫短视频. 鈥淲e would like to run RAVE until 2010 or 2011.鈥�
RAVE鈥檚 website suggests the experiment may help with the final design of the Gaia space telescope, the European Space Agency鈥檚 1 billion star-studying mission, currently planned to launch in 2011.
