Title: LAMOST Observations in the Kepler Field and Measurements of the Stellar Parameters

Speaker: Jianning Fu (Beijing Normal)  

Time & place: Thursday, 3:00pm, June 4th, lecture Hall, 3rd floor  

Abstract: The NASA Kepler satellite has provided unprecedented high duty-cycle, high-precision light curves for a large number of stars by continuously monitoring a field of view in Cygnus-Lyra region, leading to great progress in both discovering exoplanets and characterizing planet-hosting stars by means of asteroseismic methods. Although the asteroseismic survey allows the investigation of stars covering the whole H-R diagram, the low precision of effective temperatures and surface gravities in the KIC10 catalogue and the lack of information on chemical composition, metallicity and rotation rate prevent asteroseismic modelling, requiring spectroscopic observations for thousands of asteroseismic targets in the Kepler field in a homogeneous way. In 2010, we initiated the LAMOST-Kepler project which aimed at collecting low-resolution spectra for as many objects from the KIC10 catalogue as possible, with the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), a 4-m telescope equipped with 4,000 optical fibers. The first round of observations has been completed in fall 2014, covering all the 14 sub-fields at least once, resulting in more than 100,000 low-resolution spectra. The stellar atmospheric parameters are then derived and the results have been confirmed to be consistent with those reported in the literature based on high-resolution spectroscopy. The data created by the LAMOST-Kepler project can not only be used for asteroseismic study for thousands of variable stars in the FoV of Kepler, but also provide a great potential for other research fields such as exoplanet-host stars, stellar activities and flares, and particular stars, etc., together with the time-series photometric data obtained by the Kepler mission. 

Biog: Jianning Fu is an observational astronomer working in the field of stellar pulsation and asteroseismology. He obtained his PhD from Beijing Astronomical Observatory (CAS) in 1997, then went on to postdoc positions in France and Belgium, before returning to China in 2005 to take up a professorship at Beijing Normal University.