Skymapper Southern Survey: First Data Release (DR1)
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA) doi: 10.1017/pas.2017.xxx. SkyMapper Southern Survey: First Data Release (DR1) Christian Wolf1,2, Christopher A. Onken1,2, Lance C. Luvaul1, Brian P. Schmidt1,2, Michael S. Bessell1, Seo-Won Chang1,2, Gary S. Da Costa1, Dougal Mackey1, Simon J. Murphy1,3, Richard A. Scalzo1,2,4, Li Shao1,5, Jon Smillie6, Patrick Tisserand1,7, Marc C. White1 and Fang Yuan1,2,8 1Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2611, Australia 2ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) 3Present address: School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences, University of New South Wales Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia 4Present address: Centre for Translational Data Science, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia 5Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100871, P. R. China 6National Computational Infrastructure, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia 7Present address: Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 6 et CNRS, Institut d‘Astrophysique de Paris, 98 bis bd Arago, F-75014 Paris, France 8Present address: Geoscience Australia, GPO Box 378, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia Abstract We present the first data release (DR1) of the SkyMapper Southern Survey, a hemispheric survey carried out with the ANU SkyMapper Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. Version 1.1 is simultaneously released to Australian and world-wide users. Here, we present the survey strategy, data processing, catalogue construction and database schema. The DR1 dataset includes over 66,000 images from the Shallow Survey component, covering an area of 17,200 deg2 in all six SkyMapper passbands uvgriz, while the full area covered by this release exceeds 20,000 deg2. The catalogues contain over 285 million unique astrophysical objects, complete to roughly 18 mag in all bands. We compare our griz point-source photometry with PanSTARRS1 DR1 and note an rms scatter among the differences of 2%. The internal reproducibility of SkyMapper photometry is on the order of 1%. Astrometric precision is better than 0.2 arcsec based on comparison with Gaia DR1. We also present some example queries. Keywords: surveys – catalogs – methods: observational – telescopes 1 INTRODUCTION presented here covers the entire Southern hemisphere. Many surveys carried out from space-based telescopes Maps of the sky have been produced throughout the cul- aim for all-sky coverage, e.g. the Gaia survey (Gaia Col- tural history of mankind. They represented the patterns laboration, 2016), the survey by the Widefield Infrared in the sky, long believed to be static, for navigation and Survey Explorer (WISE, Wright et al., 2010), the X-ray time-keeping; they provided a reference for measuring surveys from the Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT, Voges motions and allowed the identification of transient ob- et al., 1999) and the eROSITA mission (Merloni et al., jects. Over time we came to understand our place in the 2012). These missions do not replace but complement Milky Way and the Universe at large, and discovered each other by observing the sky at different wavelengths, new phenomena such as novae and supernovae. From which allows us to see different physical components motions of celestial bodies we inferred the form and of the matter in the Universe; or they have different parameters of fundamental laws in physics such as the specialities such as Gaia’s high-precision astrometry. law of gravity and derived the existence of dark matter. Currently, a complete multi-colour inventory of the In modern times, digital surveys such as the Sloan Southern sky to a depth of g, r ≈ 22, similar to the Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, York et al., 2000) have revolu- SDSS in the Northern sky, is missing, and one aim of the tionised the speed and ease of making new discoveries. In- SkyMapper project is to fill this gap. However, SkyMap- strumental limitations imply that surveys need to strike per is not a Southern copy of the SDSS in the North, a balance between depth and areal coverage. The SDSS, in the way in which e.g. the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey e.g., covers a large part of the Northern hemisphere in (2MASS, Skrutskie et al., 2006) used two telescopes in the sky. In contrast, the SkyMapper Southern Survey two hemispheres to create a consistent all-sky dataset 1 2 Wolf et al. from the ground. The SDSS in the North was especially 5. More generally, cosmic dipoles have fundamental successful in revealing new knowledge about distant importance for understanding our place and mo- galaxies, which should appear similar in the South given tion within the Universe, and they may reveal new we live in an approximately isotropic Universe. Instead, physics beyond the Standard Model. Without an all- SkyMapper aims for new discovery space beyond just sky view, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE, repeating the SDSS in another hemisphere: Lineweaver et al., 1996) would have had a hard time measuring the motion of our Milky Way relative to 1. One focus of SkyMapper is studying the stars in the microwave background, which is a frame of ref- our Milky Way, where the hemispheres are very erence on a scale large enough to not be dominated different from each other. The Southern sky includes by its own peculiarities. Without an all-sky dataset, the bulge and centre of our Milky Way, as well as Blake & Wall(2002) would not have corroborated our two largest satellite galaxies, the Magellanic this cosmic dipole by referring to distant radio galax- Clouds. Currently, we expect that the oldest stars ies. Current debates concern e.g. a cosmic dipole in in the Milky Way will be found in the bulge, and the fine-structure constant of electrodynamics (e.g. SkyMapper has indeed found the oldest currently Webb et al., 2001; Murphy et al., 2016), and this known examples there (Howes et al., 2015). work would greatly benefit from samples of quasi- 2. The SkyMapper filters differ from SDSS filters stellar objects (QSOs) that cover most of the sky mainly in splitting the SDSS u-band into two filters: from pole to pole. SkyMapper will provide critical while the SDSS filter has (λcen, FWHM) = (358/55), coverage of the Southern hemisphere to advance SkyMapper has a violet v-band (384/28) and a more such studies. ultraviolet u-band (349/42). This choice of filters adds direct photometric sensitivity to the surface In the SDSS, spectroscopy was an integral part of the gravity of stars via the strength of the Hydrogen project, carried out at the same facility when the seeing Balmer break driving changes in the u−v colour, as was better matched to the task of feeding large fibres well as to their metallicity via metal lines affecting than to taking sharp images of the sky. From the start, the v − g colour. By exploiting this information, SDSS planned to take a million spectra of bright galaxies SkyMapper has found the most chemically pristine as well as other objects of special interest, and over star currently known (Keller et al., 2014). We note time the facility has been extended to allow dedicated that the filters (griz) differ from their SDSS cousins spectroscopic surveys for several hundreds of thousands in width and central wavelength by up to 40 nm of stars, as well as over a million luminous red galaxies (see Table1, and Fig. 17 for colour terms). (LRGs) and nearly 300,000 QSOs (SDSS-3, Alam et al., 3. Galaxies in the Southern sky are of special inter- 2015). est when their distances are below 500 Mpc, as SkyMapper, in contrast, was planned from the start the distinct large-scale structure creates environ- as a pure imaging project, with periods of poor seeing ments that differ from the ones in the North. While dedicated to a transient survey (Scalzo et al., 2017) that the Northern hemisphere has the iconic Virgo and finds supernovae by repeatedly imaging part of the sky, Coma galaxy clusters as well as the CfA2 and SDSS while using the main Southern Survey as a reference. Great Walls (Geller & Huchra, 1989; Gott et al., Spectroscopy of a large number of objects was always 2005), the South distinguishes itself with the Shap- going to be possible using the AAOmega spectrograph at ley supercluster and the Southern extension to the the fibre-fed 2-degree Field facility (Sharp et al., 2006) Virgo Cluster. at the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope, which can 4. As no ground-based telescope is capable of observ- take spectra of nearly 400 objects simultaneously. Also, ing the entire sky across two hemispheres, the syn- spectra of stars would initially not be required in large ergy of combining data from different telescopes numbers as the detailed photometric data of SkyMapper is limited by their location. Several cutting-edge provide great power to preselect rare objects of interest, wide-field radio telescopes are now being built in such as extremely metal-poor stars. the Southern hemisphere, including the Australian However, Australian expertise in multi-fibre instru- SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP, Johnston et al., 2007, mentation has now led to a new instrument for multi- 2008) and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA, object spectroscopy that greatly reduces the cost per Tingay et al., 2013) observing low radio frequencies, spectrum in massive spectroscopic surveys. The new as well as the future Square Kilometre Array (SKA, Taipan facility currently being commissioned at the UK Carilli & Rawlings, 2004). ASKAP and MWA are Schmidt Telescope is expected to take up to a million creating deep maps of the radio sky across more spectra of stars and galaxies per year, and the epony- than the Southern hemisphere, and providing them mous Taipan galaxy survey will use SkyMapper for its with a homogeneous optical reference atlas is a source selection (da Cunha et al., 2017).