With the discoveries of thousands of planets, the Kepler mission has brought revolutions to the exoplanet researching field, which is advancing from studying individual exoplanets to characterizing planet populations. However, making any reliable statistical inference with a large Kepler planet sample is seriously limited by the lack of accurate stellar parameters for the majority of the targets. With 4000 fibers and 5 degrees of diameter field of view, the LAMOST is uniquely positioned to perform a systematic spectroscopic survey of Kepler target stars, forming a complete and unbiased sample to perform statistical inference on planet distribution and correlations with host properties, which provides new insights on planet formation and evolution. This talk will review several such statistical studies, showing how LAMOST can impact the study Kepler planets. In the future, LAMOST will continue to play such a crucial role in the TESS era.

BIO: Dr Ji-Wei Xie is an associate Professor in the Astronomy Department at the Nanjing University.
He was a Joint PhD student of Nanjing University and University of Florida, and obtained his PhD in 2011 on the topic of “Planet Formation and Dynamics in Binary Star Systems”. He further explored exoplanets and planet formation as a postdoc in University of Toronto from 2011 to 2013. After that, he came back to China and joined the faculty in the School of Astronomy and Space Science at Nanjing University. Recently, he is interesting in combining photometric (e.g., Kepler) and spectroscopic (e.g., LAMOST) observations to discover new exoplanets and to reveal their properties and formation clues.