After the fall of history Arecibo Theater in Puerto Rico, China has opened up the world’s largest radio telescope to international scientists.
In Pingtang, Guizhou district stands Five hundred meter Spherical Aperture Telescope (FAST), the world’s largest radio telescope, overrides the Arecibo Observatory, which stood as the largest in the world for 53 years before construction of FAST was completed in 2016. After two failures cable earlier this year went the Arecibo radio telescope it fell in November, closing down the observatory for good. Now, FAST is opening its doors to astronauts from all over the world.
“Our scientific committee aims to make FAST increasingly open to the international community,” Wang Qiming, chief investigator of the FAST operations and development center, told the AFP news agency when he visited the telescope, according to French news site AFP.
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China will accept requests this year (2021) from foreign scientists who want to use the instrument for their research, according to the report.
With its massive 1,600-foot (500-meter) diameter dish, FAST is not only bigger than the now-destroyed Arecibo telescope, but it’s also three times more sensitive. FAST, which became fully operational in January this year, is also surrounded by a 3-mile (5 kilometer) “radio silent” zone where cell phones and computers are not allowed.
“We drew a lot of encouragement from him [Arecibo’s] structure, which we gradually developed to build our telescope, “Qiming said.
Radio telescopes like FAST use antennas and radio receivers to detect radio waves from radio sources in the cosmos, such as stars, galaxies and black holes. These instruments can also be used to emit radio signals and even to emit radio light from objects in the solar system (such as planets) to see what information might bounce back.
Researchers can use FAST to not only study the universe but also to explore an alien world, determining whether they rest in the “or not.goldilocks zone“near their host star, and also looking for an alien life.
Notably, in 1974 at Arecibo, scientists were working to find information outside the country, or SETI, they sent out an interstellar radio message to the M13 global body in the hope of proving intelligent outer life. The message was co-written by astronaut and science communicator Carl Sagan, helping to popularize Arecibo and radio astronomy in general.
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