About the Group
We mine the flood of spectra left by modern sky surveys, together with machine learning, to answer an old question: how stars are born, evolve and die. Our current focus is a family of hot compact stars called hot subdwarfs — a key late stage of stellar evolution and part of the cosmic age ladder.
Host Platform
The Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Stellar & Interstellar Medium was approved in December 2019 and started construction in July 2020. Hosted at the School of Physics and Optoelectronics, Xiangtan University, it conducts research on stellar physics and the interstellar medium.
Discipline History
Astrophysics at Xiangtan University dates back to the early 1990s, with three decades of continuous work on stellar evolution and magnetic activity; an asteroid was named “Xiangda” after the university.
Projects & Funding
The laboratory has been granted 20+ NSFC grants, including the Key Program, the General Program, the Young Scientists Fund (Class B) and the Young Scientists Fund (Class C), and undertakes tasks including the Space Telescope Joint Fund, the Astronomy Joint Fund and CSST sub-projects.
Collaboration Network
Long-term collaborations with the National Astronomical Observatories (CAS), Shandong University, the Czech Academy of Sciences and others, participating in LAMOST and Gaia science.
How We Work
Data-driven plus theory: we identify and measure stars from LAMOST / Gaia surveys with machine learning, and interpret the observations with stellar-evolution theory — each side calibrating the other. Reusable computing capability is packaged as online services open to the community.
Platform in Numbers
How We Count Publications
The Publications page only lists entries traceable to published papers; laboratory-wide statistics are labeled separately to avoid mixed scopes.