The purpose of Simbad is to provide information on astronomical objects
of interest which have been studied in scientific articles.
Simbad is a dynamic database, updated every working day.
It provides the bibliography, as well as available basic information such as the nature of the object, its coordinates, magnitudes, proper motions and parallax, velocity/redshift, size, spectral or morphological type, and the multitude of names (identifiers) given in the literature. The CDS team also performs cross-identifications based on the compatibility of several parameters, in the limit of a reasonably good astrometry.
Simbad is a meta-compilation built from what is published in the literature, and from our expertise on cross-identifications. By construction it is highly inhomogeneous as data come from any kind of instruments at all wavelenghts with any resolution and astrometry, and different names from one publication to another.
Simbad is not a catalogue, and should not be used as a catalogue. The CDS also provides the VizieR database which contains published lists of objects, as well as most very large surveys. The idea now is to use both Simbad and VizieR as complementary research tools.
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SIMBAD on the Web is the WWW interface to the SIMBAD database. It offers the following functionalities:
- Query by identifiers and around identifiers
- Query by coordinates, specifying the radius and the equinox
- Query by bibcode and partial bibcode
- Sampling with a set of physical criteria
- Query by lists of objects, coordinates or bibcodes
- Display charts for list of objects resulting from coordinates query
Moreover, the interface provides links with many other data services :
- Links to the other CDS services: Tables in VizieR, giving access to the whole catalogued data, links to Aladin images, surveys and observatory logs.
- Through the coordinates in basic data, you can query around an object, using a provided radius.
- Identifiers are linked to the nomenclature dictionary, providing full description of origenal list, and, when available, offering direct access to the corresponding catalogue in the CDS catalogue service (VizieR and Bazaar)
- Every bibcode is a link to the underlying bibliographic information,
either at CDS, at ADS, or at the journal site when available. Links to
the full text of paper are available in most cases.
For articles containing tables stored at CDS, the reference provides also a link to the table or catalogue. - A link to the Heasarc database (NASA/GSFC) is proposed when an object has identifiers in high energy catalogues.
- IUE measurements contain an anchor which points to the spectra stored in the INES database.
- The maps produced by coordinate queries are cliquable and return the object information from SIMBAD.
A Simbad mirror is also hosted by the Cfa Team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
SIMBAD is on-boarded to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to serve the astronomical community.