Chinese telescope LAMOST reaches new milestone in spectral data

The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) has become the world's first sky survey telescope to release more than 22 million spectra, said the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

The NAOC on Friday unveiled the LAMOST DR10 dataset to domestic users and foreign partners. The dataset consists of over 22.29 million spectra, exceeding the number of spectra released by all other international sky survey telescopes combined by 2.9 times.

According to the NAOC, the dataset is a collection of spectral data acquired by LAMOST observations from October 2011 to June 2022, including 11.81 million low-resolution spectra and 10.48 million medium-resolution spectra.

LAMOST became the first sky survey telescope in the world to release over 10 million spectra in 2019. Over the last four years, the number of spectra acquired by LAMOST has doubled, the NAOC noted.

To date, 1,385 users from 194 research institutes and universities in China, the United States, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, and other countries and regions are using LAMOST data for their research, said the NAOC.

Known as Guo Shoujing Telescope in China, LAMOST was put into operation to gather high-quality spectra, an important collection of data that helps astronomers concerned with celestial bodies' chemical composition, density, atmosphere and magnetism.