星系的形成和演化问题是当今天体物理的前沿和核心。由于身居其中,而且可以对单个的恒星进行仔细的观测,银河系因此成为了研究星系的形成和演化乃至宇宙学的一个极重要样本。银河系的晕(包括恒星晕和暗物质晕)被证实具有非常复杂的结构,其中所蕴藏的信息使人们有可能揭示银河系的结构、形成和丰富的演化历史,其中的一些特殊天体可以用来探求银河系中央黑洞等当下天体物理的热点问题。LAMOST银河系恒星低分辨光谱巡天是迄今为止最大的同类观测项目,其形成的数据库非常适宜人们开展许多银河系结构和演化方面的工作。文章介绍了LAMOST银河系巡天在银晕和相关结构上正在开展的研究工作,并展示了一些早期的科学研究成果。
The formation and evolution of galaxies is an extremely important and fundamental question in modern astrophysics. Among the galaxies, the Milky Way is a very special sample not only because we live in it, but also because it is the only one in which we can carefully and individually observe its member stars. It has been confirmed that the Galactic halo, including both the stellar spheroid and the dark matter halo, contains fairly complicated structures, from which the overall shape, formation, and evolutionary history of our Galaxy can be unveiled.Moreover, some very rare and special stars in the Milky Way can be used as tracers to indirectly detect the core region of the Galaxy around the central super-massive black hole, which is also a hot topic of astrophysics. The LAMOST survey of the Milky Way will collect millions of stellar spectra at low wavelength resolution, making it the largest of such projects throughout the world.Its data base is very suitable for the study of the structure and evolution of the Milky Way. In this article, we report our on- going studies on the Galactic halo with LAMOST data, and present some early scientific results.