This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| KiDS survey | |
|---|---|
| Name | KiDS survey |
| Full name | Kilo-Degree Survey |
| Established | 2011 |
| Telescope | VLT Survey Telescope |
| Instrument | OmegaCAM |
| Wavelength | Optical, near-ultraviolet |
| Area | ~1500 square degrees |
| Principal investigators | Roelof de Jong, Konrad Kuijken, Luca van Waerbeke |
| Data release | Multiple public data releases |
KiDS survey
The Kilo-Degree Survey is a wide-field optical imaging programme conducted with the VLT Survey Telescope and the OmegaCAM instrument at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory. Designed as a deep, high-quality imaging survey covering roughly 1500 square degrees, the project interfaces with other major projects such as the VISTA Hemisphere Survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the Dark Energy Survey. Principal investigators include astronomers associated with institutions like the Leiden Observatory, the University of Groningen, and the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute.
KiDS is a photometric survey optimized for weak gravitational lensing and large-scale structure studies, emphasizing image quality, photometric calibration, and multi-band coverage. The survey strategy complements northern-hemisphere efforts exemplified by CFHTLenS and southern-hemisphere endeavours like the DES Science Verification. KiDS observations use multiple filters to obtain colours for photometric redshift estimation, interfacing with spectroscopic campaigns such as the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey for calibration. The programme has produced community data releases that have been used in analyses alongside datasets from missions like Planck, Gaia, and Euclid precursor studies.
Observations are obtained with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), a 2.6-metre facility built by Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte and operated by European Southern Observatory. The focal-plane camera, OmegaCAM, is a 32-CCD mosaic developed by a consortium including INAF and Sterrewacht Leiden. KiDS uses the u, g, r, i filter set to balance depth and seeing, with typical r-band seeing optimized for weak-lensing shape measurements to reach shape-noise limits comparable to space-based imagers such as the Hubble Space Telescope in certain regimes. Overlapping infrared coverage from the VISTA instrument via the VISTA Kilo-degree Infrared Galaxy (VIKING) survey augments photometry for stellar and galaxy population studies, enabling cross-calibration with photometric systems like those used by the Pan-STARRS project and the CFHT MegaCam instrument.
Image reduction and catalogue production employ pipelines developed by the KiDS team, integrating software from groups associated with Astro-WISE, THELI, and custom modules from the Leiden Observatory and Groningen data centres. Processing steps include bias correction, flat-fielding, illumination correction, astrometric calibration tied to Gaia reference frames, and photometric homogenization referenced to standards used by SDSS and Pan-STARRS1. Shear measurement utilises shape measurement algorithms benchmarked against challenges like GREAT3 and compared with methods from teams behind CFHTLenS and DES. Public data releases have included calibrated images, multi-band catalogues, photometric redshifts, and shear catalogues, with successive releases increasing in area, depth, and validation by cross-matching to spectroscopic samples such as GAMA, VIPERS, and zCOSMOS.
Primary scientific drivers are precision cosmology via weak gravitational lensing, mapping dark matter distribution, and constraining dark energy through tomographic shear analyses, complementary to constraints from Planck CMB anisotropies and baryon acoustic oscillation measurements from BOSS. KiDS has yielded competitive measurements of the matter clustering parameter often compared against results from Planck and debates over the S8 tension between large-scale structure and CMB-derived parameters. Ancillary science includes galaxy evolution studies using multi-band photometry in conjunction with spectroscopic samples such as SDSS and GAMA, strong-lensing discoveries comparable to systems studied with HST follow-up, and Milky Way structure investigations aided by cross-matches to Gaia astrometry. KiDS results have also informed simulations and semi-analytic models developed by groups linked to Illustris and EAGLE simulation projects.
The survey is executed by an international collaboration of institutes across Europe and beyond, including teams from Leiden Observatory, Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, INAF, University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, and ETH Zurich. Operational coordination interacts with the European Southern Observatory scheduling and data management frameworks, and collaboration governance includes science working groups focused on lensing, photometric redshifts, galaxy evolution, and Milky Way science. KiDS has engaged with external projects such as VIKING, GAMA, and the Euclid Consortium for methodological crosschecks, and has contributed to community-wide initiatives like the GREAT lensing challenges and reproducibility efforts promoted by institutions like Leiden University.
Data releases from KiDS are distributed publicly under terms set by the collaboration, enabling reuse by researchers affiliated with institutes such as Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Cambridge University, and University of Toronto. Users are expected to follow citation norms requesting acknowledgement of original KiDS data papers and associated survey description articles published in journals where teams from A&A, MNRAS, and ApJ serve as typical venues. Cross-collaboration data sharing with projects like VIKING and archives maintained by ESO facilitate access for legacy science, while proprietary-period policies for certain value-added catalogues are specified by the consortium to coordinate internal analyses prior to public release.
Category:Astronomical surveys