Collaborative Research: A Large Stellar Library for Astronomical Research

Stellar spectral libraries underpin spectroscopic analysis in stellar, galactic, and extragalactic astronomy; they are fundamental for modeling stellar populations in galaxies. Existing empirical stellar libraries have poor sampling in several important parts of the stellar parameter space, do not provide adequate wavelength coverage and spectral resolution for the state-of-the-art galaxy surveys, and often have poor flux calibration. Theoretical stellar libraries are not yet realistic enough to match the observed colors of stars and galaxies; this reveals an incomplete understanding of important stellar physics. To address these problems, we propose to build a large, well-calibrated, high quality empirical stellar library (referred as MaStar) of ~6000 stars covering the wavelength range of 3600-10,3000A at a resolution of R~2000, with better than 3% relative flux calibration. It will be achieved by conducting parallel optical observations piggybacking on the APOGEE-2 survey as part of SDSS-IV.