Chinese large telescope releases over 30 mln spectra to international collaborators

China's Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) on Tuesday issued its latest dataset, including more than 30 million spectra, to domestic astronomers and international collaborators, cementing its position as the survey project with the highest number of released spectra worldwide.

According to the LAMOST Operation and Development Center of the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), the dataset, dubbed DR13, covers an observation period from October 2011 to June 2025, encompassing 6,961 low-resolution observation patches and 3,404 medium-resolution observation patches.

The 30.82 million spectra released include roughly 13.47 million low-resolution spectra and 17.35 million medium-resolution spectra. Additionally, it features a stellar spectral parameter catalog containing about 12.94 million entries.

The total number of spectra released by LAMOST and the scale of its stellar parameter catalog continue to lead the world, the NAOC said.

To date, over 1,900 users from 278 institutions across countries and regions including China, the US, Germany, Belgium and Denmark have conducted research using data generated by LAMOST, resulting in the publication of more than 2,200 high-quality papers.

In recent years, LAMOST data have helped publish over 300 papers annually, with more than 40 percent of these papers authored by foreign astronomers. Its overall scientific output places LAMOST among the world's leading large astronomical telescopes in the 6-to-10-meter class.

As China's first major national sci-tech infrastructure in the field of astronomy, LAMOST pioneered global large-scale spectroscopic sky surveys and has been operating efficiently and stably for 14 years. Its spectra have enabled global astronomers to conduct the most systematic research to date on the structure and evolution of the Milky Way, and have led to a series of breakthroughs in areas such as the search for compact objects, stellar physics, exoplanets and quasars.