China has finished building the world’s biggest radio telescope, which it will use to explore space and hunt for extraterrestrial life. The Five hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is the size of 30 soccer fields and has been hewn out of a mountain in the south-western province of Guizhou.
The telescope has been designed so that individual panels can be rearranged to focus on and track radio waves from specific objects of interest, which will give the dish much greater range and sensitivity than rival dishes.
O’Brien says FAST will enable more-detailed studies of pulsars: ultra-dense collapsed cores of exploding stars. “We may even find [more] pulsars outside our own galaxy,” he says. “It will also allow us to survey hydrogen in very distant galaxies, detect molecules in space, search for natural radio wave emissions from planets orbiting other stars and help in the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.”
Picture Credit : Google