China operationalises world’s largest radio telescope
BEIJING : China has operationalised the world’s largest radio telescope with a diameter of half-a-kilometre. The colossal device is expected to make major scientific discoveries in the coming years, state media reported.
The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is a single-dish telescope and is located in southwest China’s Guiyang city, the capital of Guizhou province. It has a receiving area of around 30 football fields.
The telescope was put to work on Saturday after three years of trial operation, the official news agency Xinhua reported. It will gradually open to astronomers around the globe, providing them with a powerful tool to uncover the mysteries surrounding the genesis and evolutions of the universe.
All technical indicators of the telescope have reached or exceeded the planned level, and its performance is worldleading, Shen Zhulin, an official with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said at the opening of the telescope.
Dubbed as “China Sky Eye”, FAST is about 2.5 times as sensitive as the secondlargest telescope in the world and capable of receiving a maximum of 38 gigabytes of information per second.
“With a cost of nearly 1.2-billion-yuan (around
US$170 million), FAST was completed in September 2016, over 20 years after it was proposed by Chinese astronomers,” state media reported.
Scientists from the US, Britain and Pakistan along with their counterparts from China have worked at FAST.
“More global collaborations are expected in areas such as gravitational wave detection and very-longbaseline interferometry following its formal operation,” the Xinhua report said.