Professors at the University are constantly pushing the boundaries of their disciplines, whether in nanotechnology or literary theory. Few, however, can claim their research may help piece together the history of the universe.
But astrophysics professors Gillian Knapp, James Gunn and Michael Strauss are trying to do just that. They have been involved with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for more than a decade. The project seeks to photograph everything in the sky with a high-powered and precise camera designed and programmed by the professors.
"This project is to map the universe in space and time. The universe is very big, so the light coming to you from very distant objects has taken billions of years to cross the universe, so it's a kind of time machine," Knapp said.
Gunn and Knapp, a husband-and-wife team, have taught at the University since 1980 and began working on the project in 1989, when advances in technology finally allowed them to build a camera that could take the high-quality photographs they needed.
Strauss, who came to Princeton via the Institute for Advanced Study, joined the project around 1991 and his duties include serving as the project's spokesperson. He also uses the Sky Survey camera to research his academic interests, such as locating quasars, the very bright centers of distant galaxies.
Aside from teaching, Strauss said he spends nearly all his free time on the Sky Survey project.
During the early stages of the project, only about 100 people were involved, Knapp said. Gunn had a team of people building the camera while Knapp and another group wrote software for it. Now, however, thousands of people work with the data from the Sky Survey, she said.
The camera used for the project is in New Mexico, where the clear skies are ideal for photographing the heavens.
"[Our camera] is at the moment pretty unique, in the sense that it's 100 percent for this project," Strauss said.
He added that there are limitations to how much of the sky can be photographed.
"The full sky is about 31,000 degrees. It has taken us five years to get roughly a little less than 20 percent of the sky," he said.
Besides time constraints, the location of the telescope, as well as the structure of the Milky Way itself prevent the entire sky from being photographed.
"When you look at the sky on a clear night you can see the band of light that is the Milky Way. There's a lot of dusty material . . . within our galaxy, which blocks the light [of stars]," he said.
Much of Sky Survey's contribution to knowledge has come from others' use of the data, Knapp said.
"Most of the science being done today with the data is by people who had nothing to do with [the research]," she said.
The tens of terabytes of information from the Sky Survey can be accessed via Internet by people around the world. The data is accessed by everyone from professors to high school students, Knapp said.
Strauss agreed, saying his favorite part of the project was the variety of information it has generated.
"The data is spectacular. The data is all there, just waiting to be used . . . There is all this research at our fingertips," he said.
Strauss added that about 630 papers have been published citing the survey as a source.
"I'm really astonished — and really pleased — at how big a number that is," he said.
There is a growing trend in the sciences to share databases of information like this, Knapp said. "In science it's become so expensive to do things that a lot of the payoff comes from putting the data out there."
The Sky Survey has received funding from several sources, including the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Sloan Foundation.
"We kept running out of money, so more people would join and they would give us money. What they get in return is access to the data," Knapp said.
The total cost of the Sky Survey is close to $100 million and, barring a funding shortage, it will be complete in two to three years.
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