China builds world’s largest single-dish radio telescope

The world’s biggest single-dish radio telescope  with a reflector as large as 30 football pitches  has begun operating in south-western China, a project Beijing says will help humanity search for alien life. The five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), located in a rural part of China’s Guizhou province is used to try to solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries. One of its primary missions is to detect interstellar communication signals, or, put simply, messages from alien civilisations. According to the Guardian, FAST was built at a cost of 1.2bn yuan (US$183m) and dwarfs the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico to become the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, made up of 4,450 panels. China sees its ambitious, military-run, multi-billion-dollar space programme as symbolising the country’s progress. It plans a permanent orbiting space station by 2020 and eventually a manned mission to the moon. Another primary goal is to observe pulsars—rotating neutron stars. These are some of the densest objects in the universe. They are the remnants of the gravitational collapse of massive stars, cramming about 1.4 solar masses' worth of matter into a sphere measuring just 12 miles across. On Earth, a teaspoon of matter from a neutron star would weigh over 1 billion tons. Chinese researchers use FAST for early stage research and it is open to scientists from across the world. https://youtu.be/qimr5f1O9lU