Science breakthroughs with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Results and opportunities

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey represents a new paradigm for optical astronomy. It is a consortium involving several hundred astronomers from the US, Japan, and Germany, and aims to obtain basic photometric and spectroscopic data of a large representative region of the high Galactic latitude sky. Using a dedicated wide-field 2.5m telescope and unique instrumentation and software, it is imaging the sky in five photometric bands, and obtaining high-quality spectra of magnitude-limited samples of galaxies and quasars. Although the original survey goals are oriented towards large-scale structure studies, the survey is yielding major results in fields ranging from high-redshift quasars to Galactic structure, from studies of galaxy properties to asteroids, from brown dwarfs to fluctuations in the Earth's atmosphere. I will give a broad overview of some of these results and give thoughts on some of the types of results we can look forward to in the future of the survey.