China’s Big Boy Telescope Is Finally Ready to Hunt Some Aliens - Popular Mechanics

• China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is finally fully operational.
• Since it booted up in September, it’s already made a ton of new discoveries about the universe.
• Researchers will use the telescope to unravel mysteries about the universe, listen for gravitational waves and fast radio bursts, and discover other incredibly faint celestial phenomena.

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China officially booted up its Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) over the weekend, even though construction wrapped in 2016 and the telescope has already produced several incredible findings.

Located in the remote Pingtang County in Guizhou, China, the now fully operational telescope has set a new record for the largest single dish radio telescope in the world. (The next largest radio dish is at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which is known for finding pulsars, mapping planets, and starring in the 1995 James Bond flick GoldenEye.) The diameter of FAST’s dish measures nearly half a kilometer and is made up of more than 4,400 aluminum panels which are tilted and turned by about 2,000 mechanical winches.

Because of this, it’s also the most sensitive radio telescope in the world—2.5 times more sensitive than any currently operating radio telescope. This means it’ll be able to probe the deepest, darkest corners of the universe. FAST is part of the Breakthrough Initiatives program, an international cooperation between telescopes in the U.S., Australia, and China, which aims to search for signs of alien civilizations in the universe.

FAST has been in final tests for three years, and it has already spotted 102 brand new pulsars, a type of rotating neutron star that emits a twinkling flash of electromagnetic radiation at regular intervals. It also registered a number of fast radio bursts, fleeting pulses of radiation emitted from distant corners of the universe. In September, Nature News reported that the telescope passed a series of performance assessments and was given the green light by the Chinese government.

The telescope will be tasked with tracking gravitational waves as the zoom toward Earth, exploring the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, and measuring even more of these mysterious fast radio bursts. Most notably, researchers hope the telescope will finally pinpoint signs of life elsewhere in the universe.

Only time will tell.

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China’s Big Boy Telescope Is Finally Ready to Hunt Some Aliens - Popular Mechanics
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