Welcome to the SONG homepage

SONG is an initiative to construct a global network of 1-m class robotic telescopes.

The scientific goals of SONG are:
  

to study the internal structure and evolution of stars using asteroseismology.   

to search for and characterize planets with masses comparable to the Earth in orbit around other stars.

Several factors limit progress in these fields, the most important being the impossibility of obtaining long-term and continuous observations at existing facilities. The plan for SONG is to build a network consisting of 8 telescope nodes located at existing observatories. There will be four nodes in each hemisphere each equipped with identical telescopes and instrumentation. This will allow objects to be observed with a high duty-cycle over long (months) periods of time.

At each node the instruments will be a high-resolution spectrograph and an imaging camera. Both will be optimized for the main science goals. For further details of the outline of a SONG node we encourage you to look at this link.

SONG news:

   Talks from the workshop

   Mar. 23-26  2009: 2nd SONG Workshop in Aarhus.

   Feb.  2008: Press-Release (in Danish) here.
   Jan.  2008: The detailed design of a prototype SONG node has started
   Mar.  2007: Final Review of Conceptual Design Phase
   Aug. 2006: Midterm Review
   May. 2006: Design work on the SONG spectrograph by the Anglo-Australian Observatory
   Mar.  2006: The first SONG workshop held in Aarhus
   Dec.  2005: Funding for a Conceptual Design study of a network obtained