Rosemary Wyse Quotations

One important early application of RAVE aims to measure just how much stuff there is in our Milky Way galaxy -- the collection of stars, gas and dark matter that is the home of our sun. Newton's Law of Gravity allows us to figure out from the orbital motions of stars how much mass is holding them together. Faster motions need more mass. We know from analyzing the motions in other galaxies that there is a lot more mass than we can see and this dark matter appears to dominate. But we are not sure exactly how much dark matter is needed in our own galaxy, and we don't know what the dark matter is made up of. That information is important, and the RAVE survey is going to help us answer some of those questions.

Our research focuses on the oldest stars, and probes the earliest phases of the evolution of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The unprecedented sample available with RAVE will allow me -- and now, with the release of this data, others -- to test ideas of our origins laid out by various cosmological theories.

The data we are making public today is twice the sample size of any previous survey, and has extremely high quality. Other astronomers can definitely use these data in their work. All they have to do is go to our Web site and download it.