The 6dF Galaxy Survey: Samples, observational techniques and the first data release

By D. Jones, Will J. Saunders, M. Colless, M. Read, Q. Parker, F. Watson, L. Campbell, D. Burkey, T. Mauch, M. Hartley and 13 more. 2004

441 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The 6dF Galaxy Survey (6dFGS) aims to measure the redshifts of around 150 000 galaxies, and the peculiar velocities of a 15 000-member subsample, over almost the entire southern sky. When complete, it will be the largest redshift survey of the nearby Universe, reaching out to about z similar to 0.15, and more than an order of magnitude larger than any peculiar velocity survey to date. The targets are all galaxies brighter than K-tot = 12.75 in the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC), supplemented by 2MASS and SuperCOSMOS galaxies that complete the sample to limits of (H, J, r(F), b(J)) = (13.05, 13.75, 15.6, 16.75). Central to the survey is the Six-Degree Field (6dF) multifibre spectrograph, an instrument able to record 150 simultaneous spectra over the 5.7-field of the UK Schmidt Telescope. An adaptive tiling algorithm has been employed to ensure around 95 per cent fibring completeness over the 17 046 deg(2) of the southern sky with \b\ > 10degrees. Spectra are obtained in two observations using separate V and R gratings, that together give R similar to 1000 over at least 4000-7500 Angstrom and signal-to-noise ratio similar to10 per pixel. Redshift measurements are obtained semi-automatically, and are assigned a quality value based on visual inspection. The 6dFGS data base is available at http://www-wfau.roe.ac.uk/6dFGS/, with public data releases occurring after the completion of each third of the survey.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

The 6dF Galaxy Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations and the local Hubble constant (2011, neutral): “Papers by Jones et al. (2004, 2006, 2009) describe 6dFGS in full detail, including comparisons between 6dFGS, 2dFGRS and SDSS. Galaxies were excluded from our sample if they resided in sky regions with completeness lower than 60 percent.”
SFI++. II. A New I-Band Tully-Fisher Catalog, Derivation of Peculiar Velocities, and Data Set Properties (2007, background): “…the brightest inclined spirals in the 2MASSRedshift Survey (2MRS; Huchra et al. 2005) and could be extended to include many more such objects, and the 6dF Galaxy Survey (Jones et al. 2004), which is planned to include optical photometry and line widths, providing FP distances for 15,000 galaxies.”
THE 2MASS REDSHIFT SURVEY—DESCRIPTION AND DATA RELEASE (2011, methodology): “C...0000J Jones et al. (2004) 2004AJ....127.1336S Stocke et al. (2004) 2004AJ....128...16K Koribalski et al. (2004) 2004AJ....128.1078R Rines et al. (2004) 2004AJ....128.1558S Smith et al. (2004) 2004AJ....128.2080O O’Neil (2004) 2004A&A...415....9W Woudt et al. (2004) 2004A&A...415...27P Pott et…”
THE FIRST CATALOG OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI DETECTED BY THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE (2010, background): “The optical spectrum from the final release of 6dFGS (Jones et al. 2004, 2009) shows no strong emission lines, but the Ca ii H/K break is too large to satisfy the criterion C < 0.4 for classification as a BL Lac.”
The 6dF Galaxy Survey: final redshift release (DR3) and southern large-scale structures (2009, methodology): “Of these, 110 256 are new redshifts from 136 304 spectra obtained with the United Kingdom Schmidt Telescope (UKST) between 2001 May and 2006 January.”
TWO MICRON ALL SKY SURVEY PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFT CATALOG: A COMPREHENSIVE THREE-DIMENSIONAL CENSUS OF THE WHOLE SKY (2013, background): “…studies of the large-scale structure in the Universe have made great progress in recent years through such projects as the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS, Colless et al. 2001), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, Eisenstein et al. 2011) and the 6dF Galaxy Survey (6dFGS, Jones et al. 2004).”
Cosmic flows in the nearby universe from Type Ia supernovae (2011, methodology): “…data set from Feldman & Watkins (2008) after replacing the 103 SNe currently contained in that data set with the 245 SNe of A1, as well as to add the Fundamental Plane peculiar velocities from NOAO Fundamental Plane Survey (Smith et al. 2006) and 6dF (Jones et al. 2004) when they become available.”
The Coincidence of Nuclear Star Clusters and Active Galactic Nuclei (2008, methodology): “We obtained optical color estimates for 147 of the 176 galaxies from Hyperleda (Paturel et al. 2003), including their B-V colors, as well as colors from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; York et al. 2000) and 6dF survey (Jones et al. 2004).”
Galaxy groups and clouds in the local (z∼ 0.01) Universe (2010, background): “New mass surveys of galaxy redshifts: 2dF (Colless et al. 2001), HIPASS (Barnes et al. 2001), 6dF (Jones et al. 2004), ALFALFA (Giovanelli et al. 2005), SDSS (Abazajian et al. 2009) present extensive opportunities for finding the groups of galaxies with a particular algorithm.”
GALAXY AND MASS ASSEMBLY (GAMA): MID-INFRARED PROPERTIES AND EMPIRICAL RELATIONS FROM WISE (2014, background): “…the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; Abazajian et al. 2003), the H i Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS; Meyer et al. 2004), the 6dF Galaxy Survey (6dFGS; Jones et al. 2004), the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS; Skrutskie et al. 2006), and the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS; Lawrence et al. 2007).”
BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey. I. Spectral Measurements, Derived Quantities, and AGN Demographics (2017, background): “The main characteristics of the 6dFGS survey are reported in Jones et al. (2004).”
The 6dF Galaxy Survey: z \approx 0 measurement of the growth rate and sigma_8 (2012, background): “The original survey papers (Jones et al. 2004, 2009) describe in full detail the implementation of the survey and its associated online database.”
A STELLAR MASS THRESHOLD FOR QUENCHING OF FIELD GALAXIES (2012, background): “…plus several other sources: the 2-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS; Colless et al. 2001), the 6-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (6dfGRS; Jones et al. 2004), ZCAT4, ALFALFA (Giovanelli et al. 2005) as well as every redshift within z < 0.055 from the NASA Extragalactic Database (NED).”
The 2M++ galaxy redshift catalogue (2011, background): “The preliminary mask for the 6dF is as given in Jones et al. (2004) : |b| > 10◦ and in the southern hemisphere δ ≤ 0◦.”
THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN: X-RAYS DRIVE THE UV THROUGH NIR VARIABILITY IN THE 2013 ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS OUTBURST IN NGC 2617 (2013, background): “Figure 2 shows a comparison between this spectrum, a spectrum from the 6dF Galaxy Survey (6dFGS) (Jones et al. 2004, 2009) taken on 2003 Apr. 25, and the spectrum from Moran et al. (1996) taken in 1994.”
Physical properties and environments of nearby galaxies (2009, background): “Along with the Two-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS; Colless et al. 2001), the Six-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (6dFGRS; Jones et al. 2004) and the 2MASS Redshift Survey (Crook et al. 2007), these massive surveys supply a detailed map of the galaxy density field and the framework…”
Radio sources in the 6dFGS: local luminosity functions at 1.4 GHz for star-forming galaxies and radio-loud AGN (2006, methodology): “Accurate velocity dispersions will be measured from spectra of the 15 000 brightest elliptical galaxies in the 6dFGS(Jones et al. 2004).”