CDS news

Beginning of June, the historical list of object types in SIMBAD will be replaced by a reorganized list, based on physical properties, and on the evolutionary stage for stars. It will enable a more interactive search, and will provide minimal definitions. The hierarchies between object types will evolve: for instance, a RR Lyrae Star will still be in the hierarchy of Variable Stars, and also in the hierarchy of Horizontal Branch Stars.

If you are using the hierarchies in scripts, you might have to adapt your scripts to the new description.

Please, have a look to the documentation on object types in SIMBAD:
https://simbad.cds.unistra.fr/guide/otypes.htx

The University of Strasbourg is reorganizing its computer network. Consequently, all CDS services in Strasbourg (Simbad, VizieR, Aladin, etc.) will be inaccessible on Oct 12 from 10 p.m. to midnight, and from Oct 14 from 10 p.m. to Oct 15 at 4 a.m. (UTC + 1). All the CDS mirror sites will remain accessible, in particular simbad.harvard.edu and vizier.cfa.harvard.edu, vizier.iucaa.in, ... We apologize for any inconvenience.

Simbad will be down during about 2 hours at 22:00 (UTC+1) the 12th of october due to University management.
Sorry for this inconvenience, please use the mirror website :
http://simbad.cfa.harvard.edu/simbad/

Due to hardware issue, the 24th of January the simbad service should be redirected temporarly to the mirror :
http://simbad.cfa.harvard.edu/simbad/

Sorry in advance for this downtime

A new feature in SIMBAD TAP allows you to submit a list of object names (e.g. by uploading your own table ; cf the documentation) and let SIMBAD try to find the correct identifier in SIMBAD.

Please read carefully the documentation (http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/tap/help/adqlHelp.html#objectNames), and if you need more help, send us an email

Cross-identification of SIMBAD with Gaia DR2

The cross-identification between the SIMBAD database and the ESA Gaia mission Data Release 2 has been successfully performed on June 30, 2018, on about 4.5 million objects.

The following data have been upgraded in SIMBAD :

4.5 million coordinates, Gaia DR2 identifiers, G magnitudes
3.8 million parallaxes
3.8 million proper motions
2.0 million radial velocities Read more...

The new TAP library (2.2 version) is now deployed on Simbad.
Please send to cds-question@astro.unistra.fr your feedback if you encounter any problem.

The acronym Gaia is going to be changed in Simbad into Gaia DR1. Read more...

Due to a better accuracy in the measurements of parallax, values and errors are now stored in mas.yr-1 (instead of arcsec before)

Simbad will be down during about 15 minutes at 12:00 (UTC+2) the 30 of august.
Sorry for this inconvenience, please use the mirror website :
http://simbad.cfa.harvard.edu/simbad/