FAST – Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope is located in Dawodang depression in Guizhou, in southwest China. It is the world’s largest single-dish Radio Telescope. FAST has a receiving area matching the size of 30 football fields. It is a National Major Scientific Project built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. FAST is operated and managed by the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The scientific Goals of FAST are
- Detect natural Hydrogen to the edge of the Universe and reconstruct the images of the early Universe
- Discover more than one thousand Pulsars, establish a Pulsar Timing Array, participate in Pulsar Navigation and Gravitational Wave Detection in the future
- Join the international Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Network to obtain Hyperfine structures of Celestial Bodies
- Perform high-resolution Radio Spectral Survey
- Detect Weak Signals
- Participate in the search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence
According to an article published on Sci-News.com, FAST has discovered 201 Pulsars. This includes the currently faintest Pulsars, which cannot be detected by other Telescopes.
The FAST team designed the Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot (GPPS) survey to detect the weak Pulsars, distant Pulsars or Pulsars in the Binary Systems.
Read more about FAST here
Read more about the new discovery published by Sci-News here
