Posted on 07/04/2016 9:19:55 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Installation was completed on the world's largest radio telescope on Sunday morning as the last of 4,450 panels was fitted into the center of the big dish.
... In the first two or three years after its completion, the telescope will undergo further adjustment, and during that period Chinese scientists will use it for early-stage research. After that, it will be open to scientists worldwide, said Peng Bo, director of the NAO Radio Astronomy Technology Laboratory.
Scientists can also carry out remote control and observation in other cities such as Beijing, more than 2,000 kilometers from the telescope site, said Peng.
Upon completion, the telescope will dwarf Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters in diameter. It will also be 10 times more sensitive than the steerable 100-meter telescope near Bonn, Germany, he said.
...
FAST will enable astronomers to get a jump-start on many scientific goals, including surveying neutral hydrogen in distant galaxies and detecting faint pulsars.
Scientists also expect breakthroughs on pulsars, the highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. So far more than 2,000 pulsars have been detected.
"Pulsars can help scientists study gravitational waves,"
...
As China joins international efforts in gravitational wave detection, FAST will help improve the chances of detecting low frequency gravitational waves, said Wu Xiangping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who predicted great breakthroughs in this area in the years ahead.
For ordinary people, perhaps the most exciting goal of FAST is the search for alien life.
...
"FAST's potential to discover an alien civilization will be 5 to 10 times that of current equipment, as it can see farther and darker planets," said Peng Bo.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.xinhuanet.com ...
DRINK YOUR OVALTINE
this thread has potential
“Can you hear me NOW”?
lol. That poor kid got ####ed :)
Life lesson.
OF COURSE, everything the Chi-Comms do is bigger and
and better then what the Western World has ever done.
It can't be any other way in the Chi-Comm mind. Anyway, best of luck on their new radio telescope. I hope it does work the way they claim it will.
Maybe something interesting will be discovered.
It used to be we were the ones that built the best and the biggest - sad how far we’ve fallen. Now we lead the world in perversion. Happy 4th, I think.
Imagine how much rice you could fit in that thing hell you could feed all of china
Tom Friedman approves.
Perhaps FAST will discover a new type of Chinese noodle that will result in immediate sterilization.
It does appear that it is more for meat and potatoes (or stir fry and rice) radio astronomy, (real science) searching for extraterrestrial life is more a public relations side show.
wait until they fill it with rice. Chopsticks will be made from two redwoods. ;-)
T.....R.....U......M......P
“We apologise for the inconvenience.”
42
So what is its diameter/radius?
It’s named the “Five-hundred-meters Aperture Spherical Telescope” or FAST. Like Aricebo, the dish is not steerable. Because it is fixed, staring straight up, it can only observe what Earth’s orbital rotations bring into view.
Thank you.
It’d be interesting to see what a space-based synthetic aperture telescope could do on a multi-kilometer frame. Shouldn’t be too long before we could do it relatively cheaply - though it might also be a collection of steerable sub-units.
Scientists will then begin debugging and trial observation of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), said Zheng Xiaonian, deputy head of the National Astronomical Observation (NAO) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which built the telescope.
Doh!
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