A unified galaxy rotation curve corpus for computational astrophysics: 438 galaxies from SPARC, THINGS, LITTLE THINGS, and WALLABY DR2
David Flynn · Astronomy and Computing · 2026
We present a unified corpus of 8963 spatially resolved rotation curve measurements across 423 galaxies (438 total catalog entries including 15 metadata-only THINGS galaxies), drawn from four major surveys: SPARC (175, HI/H α ), THINGS (34, HI), LITTLE THINGS (26, HI), and WALLABY DR2 (203, HI). The corpus is distributed as a single structured JSON file with nested per-ring kinematic data, survey metadata, column definitions, and data-quality annotations, accompanied by a 438-row flat CSV for catalog-level filtering. All radii are in kiloparsecs, all velocities in km/s. Kinematic parameters have been verified against scanned primary tables. A two-tier quality system distinguishes hand-curated rotation curves with per-point uncertainties (Tier 1) from automated pipeline products (Tier 2). A new uncertainty_type field explicitly documents the uncertainty convention for each survey, which differ importantly between surveys (e.g., THINGS uncertainties include an asymmetric-drift term absent from SPARC). The corpus is designed for both traditional numerical analysis and Large Language Model retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. An open companion platform of 25 executable Jupyter notebooks demonstrates end-to-end scientific workflows including baryonic Tully–Fisher retrieval across all four surveys, cross-survey comparison, and LLM-assisted kinematic analysis, all runnable in Google Colab without local installation. The corpus is publicly available at Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21768240) under CC BY 4.0; the notebook platform is at https://github.com/eps-research/rag-corpus-series .