Nathan de Lee - SDSS-V and Mapping Milky Way

Speaker: Nathan de Lee, Ph.D., (Northern Kentucky University)

Abstract: The fifth incarnation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) began observations in Fall of 2020. In this presentation, I will talk about SDSS-V and how it combines both optical and infrared spectroscopy along with a robotic fiber positioning system to create a survey the observes across the whole sky. I will focus much of my talk on the Milky Way Mapper program within SDSS-V and its goals of understanding the Milky Way and its constituent stars. The first of its major goals is to understand the history and structure of the Milky Way. Following upon work done with the APOGEE-1 and 2 surveys, the Milky Way Mapper will use approximately 6 million stars to trace out the detailed structure of the Galaxy. The second major goal is to understand stellar astrophysics. The Milky Way Mapper contains several smaller programs called cartons, whose goals cover a wide variety of stellar candidates including white dwarfs, binary stars, young stellar objects, planet hosts, asteroseismology targets and x-ray binaries. These cartons will allow us to explore all sorts of interesting topics that can only be done with a large-scale spectroscopic survey.