U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research: A Digital Sky Survey of theNorthern Galactic Cap

这是普林斯顿大学的詹姆斯·冈恩教授与京都大学汤川基础物理研究所的福田正孝教授共同开展的美日合作研究项目的无偿奖金。该项目允许几位日本天文学家参与由天文学研究联盟（ARC）开展的斯隆数字巡天（SDSS）项目。SDSS将生成一张详细的数字测光图，覆盖一半的北方天空，亮度约为23等。这张地图将用于选择大约100万个星系和10万个类星体，这些星系和类星体的高分辨率光谱将通过同样的宽视场专用望远镜获得。成像调查还将用于制作一份四种颜色的目录，其中包括大约10个星系，类似数量的恒星和约100万个类星体候选者。这样一组数据的科学价值是巨大的。应用范围从三维大尺度结构的关键研究到星系与其环境的关系，再到盘状矮星的暗端光度函数。日本天文学家将合作设计和制造SDSS主马赛克CCD成像相机。

This is a no-cost award to Professor James Gunn of Princeton University to support a U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research Project with Professor Masataka Fukugita of the Yukawa Institute for Fundamental Physics, Kyoto University. The project allows several Japanese astronomers to participate in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) project being carried out by the Astronomy Research Consortium (ARC). The SDSS will produce a detailed digital photometric map of half of the northern sky to about 23rd magnitude. This map will be used to select about a million galaxies and a hundred thousand quasars for which high-resolution spectra will be obtained with the same wide-field special-purpose telescope. The imaging survey will also be used to produce a catalog in four colors of all detected objects in about 10 galaxies, a similar number of stars, and about one million quasar candidates. The scientific value of such a set of data is vast. Applications range from critical investigations of large-scale structure in three dimensions to the relationships of galaxies with their environments to the faint-end luminosity function of disk dwarf stars. The Japanese astronomers will collaborate in the design and fabrication of the SDSS main mosaic CCD imaging camera.