Panoramic photo taken on January 8, 2020 shows China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) under maintenance in Southwest China's Guizhou province. [Image: Xinhua]

China completed commissioning of the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope on January 11, putting it into formal operation after a productive three-year trial.

The telescope will gradually open to astronomers around the globe, providing them with a powerful tool to uncover the mysteries surrounding the genesis and evolution of the universe.

All technical indicators of the telescope have reached or exceeded planned levels, and its performance is world-leading, Shen Zhulin, an official with the National Development and Reform Commission, said at a commissioning meeting on January 11.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is a single-dish telescope with a diameter of half a kilometer and a receiving area equivalent to about 30 football fields. It is located in a naturally deep and round karst depression in Southwest China's Guizhou province.

Now that it is commissioned, FAST can be used for observations at full capacity, and is expected to make a number of major scientific discoveries in the coming two or three years, said Jiang Peng, the chief engineer of the telescope.

Experts and scholars visit China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) under maintenance in Southwest China's Guizhou province, January 11, 2020. [Image: Xinhua]

In over two years, FAST has identified 102 new pulsars, more than the total number discovered by research teams in Europe and the United States during the same period.

It has also improved the timing accuracy of pulsars to about 50 times the previous level, making detection of extremely low-frequency Nahertz gravitational waves possible for the first time.

Dubbed "China Sky Eye," FAST is about 2.5 times as sensitive as the second-largest telescope in the world and capable of receiving up to 38 gigabytes of information per second.

FAST has expanded by a factor of four the volume of the space range that radio telescopes can effectively explore, which means that scientists can discover more unknown stars, cosmic phenomena and laws of the universe, or even detect extraterrestrial life, said Li Kejia, a scientist at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University.

Carl Heiles, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, said FAST provides revolutionary opportunities for astronomy, especially in identifying pulsars and observing interstellar clouds.

Experts and scholars visit China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) under maintenance in Southwest China's Guizhou province, January 11, 2020. [Image: Xinhua]

At a cost of nearly 1.2 billion yuan (around $170 million), FAST was completed in September 2016, over 20 years after it was proposed by Chinese astronomers.

Yan Jun, former director of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and project manager of FAST, said with growing economic strength and increasing investment in basic scientific research, China is poised to make greater contributions to the common cause of mankind.

Nearly 10 scientists from the United States, Britain and Pakistan have worked at FAST. More global collaborations are expected in areas such as gravitational wave detection and very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) as part of its formal operations.

To ensure FAST's performance, about 7,000 residents living in the vicinity were relocated, before being moved back to a town 10 km away from the telescope. An astronomy-themed park has been built around the site of FAST, drawing a large number of visitors and tourists.

Nan Rendong, who had worked as the chief scientist of a team who selected the site for FAST and oversaw its construction, died in 2017 due to sickness at the age of 72. China honored him with several posthumous titles, including "role model of our times."

Source: China Daily