Five-Hundred Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST)

About Five-Hundred Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST):

• It is a radio telescope in China’s Guizhou Province. 
• It is the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, with a receiving area equivalent to 30 football fields.
• It measures 500 meters in diameter.
• Scientific Goals:
  • Detect neutral hydrogen at the edge of the universe; reconstruct the images of the early universe;
  • Discover pulsars, establish a pulsar timing array, and 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 space signals;
  • Participate in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
• FAST uses a data system developed at ICRAR (International Center for Radio Astronomy) in Perth, Australia, and at ESO (European Southern Observatory) to manage the huge amounts of data it generates. 

Q1: What is a radio telescope?

radio telescope, astronomical instrument consisting of a radio receiver and an antenna system that is used to detect radio-frequency radiation between wavelengths of about 10 metres (30 megahertz [MHz]) and 1 mm (300 gigahertz [GHz]) emitted by extraterrestrial sources, such as stars, galaxies, and quasars.

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