The purpose of Simbad is to provide information on astronomical objectsof 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 informationsuch as the natureof the object, its coordinates, magnitudes, proper motions and parallax,velocity/redshift, size, spectral or morphological type, and the multitudeof names (identifiers) given in the literature. The CDS team also performs cross-identifications based on thecompatibility of several parameters, in the limit of a reasonablygood 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 fromany kind of instruments at all wavelenghts with any resolution andastrometry, and different names from one publication to another.
Simbad is not a catalogue, and should not be used as a catalogue. The CDSalso provides the VizieR database which contains published lists of objects, as well as most very large surveys. The idea now is to use bothSimbad and VizieR as complementary research tools.
Object types
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