Carbon stars are excellent kinematic tracers of galaxies and can serve as a viable standard candle, so it is worthwhile to automatically search for them in a large amount of spectra. In this paper, we apply the efficient manifold ranking algorithm to search for carbon stars from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) pilot survey, whose performance and robustness are verified comprehensively with four test experiments. Using this algorithm, we find a total of 183 carbon stars, and 158 of them are new findings. According to different spectral features, our carbon stars are classified as 58 C-H stars, 11 C-H star candidates, 56 C-R stars, ten C-R star candidates, 30 C-N stars, three C-N star candidates, and four C-J stars. There are also ten objects which have no spectral type because of low spec- tral quality, and a composite spectrum consisting of a white dwarf and a carbon star. Applying the support vector machine algorithm, we obtain the linear optimum clas- sification plane in the J - H versus/-/- Ks color diagram which can be used to distinguish C-H from C-N stars with their J - H and H - Ks colors. In addition, we identify 18 dwarf carbon stars with their relatively high proper motions, and find three carbon stars with FUV detections likely have optical invisible companions by cross matching with data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. In the end, we detect four variable carbon stars with the Northern Sky Variability Survey, the Catalina Sky Survey and the LINEAR variability databases. According to their periods and ampli- tudes derived by fitting light curves with a sinusoidal function, three of them are likely semiregular variable stars and one is likely a Mira variable star.
Hypervelocity stars are believed to be ejected out from the Galactic center through dynamical interactions between(binary) stars and the central supermassive black hole(s). In this paper, we report 19 low mass F/G/K type hypervelocity star candidates from over one million stars found in the first data release of the LAMOST regular survey. We determine the unbound probability for each candidate using a MonteCarlo simulation by assuming a non-Gaussian proper-motion error distribution, and Gaussian heliocentric distance and radial velocity error distributions. The simulation results show that all the candidates have unbound possibilities over 50% as expected,and one of them may even exceed escape velocity with over 90% probability. In addition, we compare the metallicities of our candidates with the metallicity distribution functions of the Galactic bulge, disk, halo and globular clusters, and conclude that the Galactic bulge or disk is likely the birth place for our candidates.
Carbon stars and DZ white dwarfs are two types of rare objects in the Galaxy. In this paper, we have applied the label propagation algorithm to search for these two types of stars from Data Release Eight (DR8) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which is verified to be efficient by calculating precision and recall. From nearly two million spectra including stars, galaxies and QSOs, we have found 260 new carbon stars in which 96 stars have been identified as dwarfs and 7 identified as giants, and 11 composition spectrum systems (each of them consists of a white dwarf and a carbon star). Similarly, using the label propagation method, we have obtained 29 new DZ white dwarfs from SDSS DR8. Compared with PCA reconstructed spectra, the 29 findings are typical DZ white dwarfs. We have also investigated their proper motions by comparing them with proper motion distribution of 9,374 white dwarfs, and fotmd that they satisfy the current observed white dwarfs by SDSS generally have large proper motions. In addition, we have estimated their effective temperatures by fitting the polynomial relationship between effective temperature and g-r color of known DZ white dwarfs, and found 12 of the 29 new DZ white dwarfs are cool, in which nine are between 6,000 K and 6,600 K, and three are below 6,000 K.
SI JianMinLUO ALiLI YinBiZHANG JianNanWEI PengWU YiHongWU FuChaoZHAO YongHeng