The First Public Data Release from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

Now freely available to the public: spectroscopic data from over half a million galaxies up to 7 billion light years away, over a hundred thousand quasars up to 11.5 billion light years away, and tens of thousands of stars and other astronomical objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s Data Release 9. This data is just the first year and a half of observation by BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey led by Berkeley Lab scientists. BOSS is the largest spectroscopic survey ever made to measure the evolution of large-scale galactic structure.