China’s FAST telescope opened up to scientists from 14 countries last year
- The Chinese Academy of Sciences says the world’s largest radio telescope granted 10 per cent of its observation time to international astronomers in 2021
- The ‘sky eye’ can detect radio signals that no other telescope can pick up – and may help in the search for extraterrestrial life
The country’s top scientific institute also said that it was considering setting aside 1 per cent of the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST)’s observation time for Chinese schoolchildren.
The academy’s vice-president Zhou Qi said on Wednesday that observations for foreign scientists began in August, adding: “The academy has set up committees to handle time allocation and users, plan the direction of research, select major projects and set up data-sharing policies.
“The efforts have been made to maximise the capacity of the ‘sky eye’ and support major scientific achievements.”
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As its name implies, the FAST dish, located in the karst mountains of the southwestern province of Guizhou, is 500 metres (1,600 feet) in diameter, covering the same area as around 30 football pitches.
Its size that allows it to intercept signals that other radio telescopes will miss – possibly including radio waves from extraterrestrials.
The academy opened the single-dish radio observatory to international applications in March last year, aiming to allocate about 1,800 hours of observation time to proposals from foreign scientists.
It said it had approved 27 such applications in total and had given foreign projects 10 per cent of observation slots as planned last year.
On Thursday, scientists from the Chinese academy’s national astronomical observatories, along with researchers from US universities, published a paper in the journal Nature using data from the FAST telescope.
This challenged classical theories about star formation after discovering that changes in the magnetic fields which play an important role in the process happen earlier than previously thought.
The telescope is also discovering pulsars at a faster pace than all the other telescopes in the world combined, identifying more than 500 since October 2017.
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These rotating stars could answer some important questions about the universe and scientists believe that the beams of electromagnetic radiation they emit could be used to guide missiles, satellites or spacecraft.
“FAST will continue to search for more pulsars and aim to see more distant pulsars outside the Milky Way,” the director of the telescope’s science committee, Wu Xiangping said, adding that it would also support scientific quests to explore the origins and evolution of the universe.
The FAST team has also been collaborating with Breakthrough Listen, a US$100-million project launched by the Israeli-Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth.