Assembly of the world’s largest radio telescope, an instrument the size of 30 football fields, was completed on Sunday, as Chinese officials installed the last of the 4,450 panels on the device that will begin operations in September, according to BBC News and Xinhua News Agency.
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope or FAST is a $180 million (£135 million) project designed to help researchers explore space and hunt for extraterrestrial life, officials from China’s space program told reporters Sunday. The next involves debugging the telescope, and then testing the instrument, they added.
During the telescope’s first two to three years of operation, it will undergo additional adjustment and will be used for early-stage research. However, it will eventually be made available to teams of scientists all over the world, Peng Bo, the director of the National Astronomical Observatories Radio Astronomy Technology Laboratory, told the state-run press agency.
Upon its completion, the telescope will eclipse Puerto Rico’s 300-meter Arecibo Observatory as the largest telescope on the planet, he added. Zheng Xiaonian, the deputy head of the NAO, said that he and his colleagues expect that FAST will be the standard bearer for radio telescopes over at least the next 10 to 20 years.
The telescope is slated to be a huge component in the search for gravitational waves and alien life. (Credit: Reuters)
Scientists believe FAST can detect gravitational waves, find alien life
The NAO, a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, clearly has high hopes for their new radio telescope. They believe that FAST can be used to study neutral hydrogen found in distant galaxies, detect faint pulsars, help detect low-frequency gravitational waves and even aid in the ongoing hunt for life on other planets, officials told Xinhua and BBC News.
Nan Rendong, chief scientist with the FAST Project, explained that “as the world’s largest single aperture telescope located at an extremely radio-quiet site, its scientific impact on astronomy will be extraordinary, and it will certainly revolutionize other areas of the natural sciences.”
FAST will improve the chances of detecting low frequency gravitational waves, according to Wu Xiangping of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Peng Bo added that the new radio telescope would increase the odds of finding an extraterrestrial civilization by at least 500% because of the instrument’s ability to observe “farther and darker planets” than current telescopes. Using FAST, NAO researchers believe they can find amino acids on distant worlds in under three years.
“The telescope is of great significance for humans to explore the universe and extraterrestrial civilizations,” Chinese science fiction writer and 2015 Hugo Award winner Liu Cixin told the Xinhua news agency from FAST’s location at a field in Pingtang County, in the southwestern province of Guizhou. “I hope scientists can make epoch-making discoveries.”
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Image credit: Xinhua News
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