High-mass star formation | Galactic Center | Radio astronomy

Xing "Walker" Lu

I am a research professor at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences. My work uses radio and submillimeter observations to study how massive stars and clusters form in dense, turbulent molecular clouds, especially in the Central Molecular Zone of the Milky Way.

Email Research CONCERT Campaign Publications on ADS GitHub CV (PDF)

Current Focus

How stars form in extreme Galactic environments

I work across scales from Galactic-plane surveys to sub-1000 AU views of individual protostellar systems. The common thread is connecting cloud-scale dynamics, magnetic fields, fragmentation, and feedback to the growth of massive stars. The CONCERT campaign brings these measurements together across four representative CMZ clouds.

CMZ star formation

Measuring where the dense-gas star formation relation succeeds or fails in the Galactic Center.

Protoclusters

Resolving fragmentation, disks, outflows, and gas streamers around massive protostars.

CONCERT campaign

Coordinating observations from cloud scales to filaments, dense cores, magnetic fields, disks, and feedback in the CMZ.

Analysis tools

Building and sharing Python tools for spectral-line fitting, data cubes, and 3D visualization.

Recent Activity

Selected 2025–2026 updates

CONCERT campaign website: a connected map of the publications and subcampaigns that follow CMZ gas from cloud structure to protostellar disks and feedback.
Sgr C protostar disk and streamers: resolving a Keplerian disk and two-arm streamer feeding system around an early O-type protostar.
ALMA protostellar disk comparison: interactively compare two observing epochs of a disk in the CMZ.
ACES IV: contributing to ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey data products for star-forming regions in the Galactic Center. See the official ACES project and data-release page.
ALMA polarization in the 20 km/s Cloud: using dust polarization to probe magnetic-field structure in two massive clumps.
CONCERT DUET paper: the Dual-band Unified Exploration of Three CMZ Clouds subproject uses matched 1.3 mm and 3 mm observations for a cloud-wide continuum-source census.

Email

xinglv.nju(at)gmail.com

Address

Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences
80 Nandan Road, Xuhui, Shanghai 200030, China

Profiles and Campaigns

SHAO personal page
CONCERT campaign website
INFANT campaign website (forthcoming)

A 3D printed glass cube of ALMA CO outflows and dust emission — A 3D-printed glass cube of CO outflows and dust emission in a Galactic star-forming region observed by ALMA. See the 3D model, the TDViz code, and Zhang et al. 2015.