Following the collapse of the historian Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, China has opened the world’s largest radio telescope for international scientists.
In Pingtang, Guizhou Province Spherical telescope with a diaphragm of five hundred meters (FAST), the largest radio telescope in the world, surpassing the Arecibo Observatory, which was the largest in the world for 53 years before the completion of FAST construction in 2016. Following two cable failures earlier this year, the Arecibo radio telescope collapsed in November, the definitive closure of the observatory. Now, FAST is opening its doors to astronomers around the world.
“Our scientific committee aims to make FAST more and more open to the international community,” said Wang Qiming, FAST’s chief inspector of the operations and development center for the AFP news agency during a telescope visit. according to the French news site AFP.
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China will accept requests next year (2021) from foreign scientists who want to use the tool for their research, according to the report.
With its massive 500-meter-diameter spacecraft, FAST is not only larger than the now-destroyed Arecibo telescope, but three times as sensitive. FAST, which began full operations in January this year, is also surrounded by a 3-mile (5-kilometer) “radio silence” zone where mobile phones and computers are not allowed.
“It simply came to our notice then [Arecibo’s] structure, which we gradually improved to build our telescope, “Qiming said.
Radio telescopes such as FAST use antennas and radio receivers to detect Radio waves from radio sources in the cosmos, such as stars, galaxies, and black holes. These tools can also be used to send radio signals and even to reflect radio light from objects in the solar system (such as planets) to see what information might return.
Researchers can use FAST to not only explore the universe, but also to study extraterrestrial worlds, determining whether or not they rest in “goldilocks area“Next to their host star and also looking for extraterrestrial life.
Famous, in 1974 in Arecibo, the scientists who worked in search of extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI, sent an interstellar radio message to the M13 globular group in hopes of receiving confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligent life. The message was co-authored by astronomer and scientific communicator Carl Sagan, helping to popularize Arecibo and radio astronomy in general.
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