SMSS DR4 AVAILABLE! | 6 Feb 2024

SkyMapper Southern Survey Data Release 4 (SMSS DR4)

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Data Release 4 from the SkyMapper Southern Survey.

SMSS DR4 contains optical photometry in the 6 SkyMapper filters (u,v,g,r,i,z) for ~700 million astrophysical sources over 26,000 sq.deg, ranging from the South Celestial Pole to Dec=+16° for objects with data in all bands, and some sources as far North as +29°. The photometry is drawn from over 15 billion measurements made from more than 400,000 images acquired by the 1.3m SkyMapper telescope between March 2014 ...

5 TB of new external tables! | 7 Jul 2023

In anticipation of the upcoming SMSS DR4, we are making available ~5 TB of new external tables in the TAP service of SkyMapper's All-Sky Virtual Observatory (ASVO) node.

Several of these are entirely new catalogues for the SkyMapper node:

• CatWISE2020 Catalog (all-sky, W1/W2) - ext.catwise2020

• NOIRLab Source Catalog (NSC) Data Release 2 (35,000 deg², u/g/r/i/z/Y/VR) - ext.nsc_dr2

• Southern Photometric Local Universe (S-PLUS) Survey Data Release 3 (2,000 deg², u^*/g/r/i/z + 7 narrow bands) - ext.splus_dr3

Others represent updates to previous data releases:

• DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys ...

A stellar embrace ending 10,000 years ago | 7 Jul 2022

Half of all stars are born into couples, called binaries. But unfortunately, we cannot compute their lives. This may be about to change, owing to a new discovery revealing the signature of re-born binaries. 

Single stars, such as the Sun, we understand just fine: they are round and simple, and long timesteps in computer calculations are enough so we can use a computer to fast-forward into the late stages of a star's life. Binary stars, in contrast, are difficult. They may be born wide and perform a distant orbital dance around each other during the early lives. But when one ...

Voracious Black Hole Slipped Through Our Fingers for 50 years, But SkyMapper Caught It | 6 Jul 2022

The most rapidly growing supermassive black hole in the last 9 billion years of cosmic history was serendipitously found in the SkyMapper Southern Survey, while looking for something completely different!

Dr. Adrian Lucy (Space Telescope Science Institute) was using the SMSS and other imaging surveys to search the Southern sky for symbiotic binary stars, pairs of stars that are so close that the outer layers of one star are flowing onto the other. After obtaining spectroscopy of the candidates at a telescope in South Africa, Dr. Lucy (then a PhD student at Columbia University) discovered that one object was unlike the ...

Migration of services to HTTPS | 7 Aug 2021

The TAP, cone-search, and image cutout services of the SkyMapper node of the All-Sky Virtual Observatory have migrated from HTTP to HTTPS. Please be advised that you may need to update the URLs used in any scripts, bookmarks, or when connecting to the TAP endpoint with tools like TopCat. (We hope to have the TAP Registries updated soon.)

We apologise for any inconvenience.