Title: The LAMOST Galactic surveys 

Speaker: Xiaowei Liu (KIAA/PKU)  

Time & Place: Thursday, 3:00pm, October 16th, Lecture Hall, 3rd floor  

Abstract:  LAMOST (also named the Guoshoujing Telescope) is a quasi-meridian reflective Schmidt telescope with an effective aperture of 4m. It is equipped with 16 spectrographs fed by 4,000 optical fibers distributed in a field of view of 20 sq.deg. The spectra cover the whole optical wavelengths from 370 -- 910nm at a resolving power of 18,00. The LAMOST Galactic surveys were initiated in the fall of 2012. It is expected to collect over 7M stellar spectra over a five-year survey period. Hitherto, over 3M spectra have been collected. In this talk, I will present a short review of the scientific motivations, target selections, survey progress, data reduction and products, as well as the early scientific results of the surveys.

Biog: Xiaowei Liu is a Cheung Kong Scholar and professor of astronomy at Peking University. He received college education at Peking University in Astrophysics and received his PhD degree in 1992 from the Beijing Astronomical Observatory (now the National Astronomical Observatories), Chinese Academy of Sciences. He then joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, first as a postdoctoral, then as a senior research fellow. He joined the faculty of Department of Astronomy of Peking University in 2000. He is currently serving as a Vice President of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

Professor Liu's main research interest is spectroscopic study of emission line nebulae, with an emphasis on the physical processes and radiative mechanisms governing photoionized gaseous nebulae. Studies of emission line nebulae yield information of stellar nucleosynthesis and the enrichment of the interstellar medium, and of the chemical evolution of galaxies. Currently, Prof. Liu is leading a large  spectroscopic survey towards the Galactic anticenter with the newly built Chinese Large Sky Area Multi-object Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST, also named the Guoshoujing Telescope). The survey will collect optical spectra of millions of stars and provide a unique data set to study the structure, kinematics and chemistry of the Galactic disk(s) and to unravel the assemblage history of the Milky Way as an archetypical grand-design (barred) spiral galaxy.