• Astronomy: China inaugurates the largest telescope in the world
  • Chronicles of the Cosmos: the gigantic cosmic eye of China

The world's largest radio telescope officially began operating after three years of testing in the southeast China's province of Guizhou, the official press reported.

The officially known as Five Hundred Meter Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has a diameter of half a kilometer, which forms a parabolic disc as large as 30 football fields , and is one of the main technological pride of the Chinese scientific program.

According to a representative of the National Development and Reform Commission (CNDR, the main economic planning body in China), the performance of the FAST is "world leader" and will gradually open its access for astronomers from all over the planet.

The chief engineer of the telescope, Jiang Peng, said that in the next two or three years "several great scientific discoveries" will be achieved thanks to FAST.

Since it began its tests, the mill has discovered a total of 102 pulsars (neutron stars that rotate at high speed and emit periodic beams of electromagnetic radiation), a figure that, according to the state agency Xinhua, is higher than that found by the teams researchers in Europe and the United States in the same period.

The FAST is 2.5 times more sensitive than the second largest telescope in the world, and according to Li Kejia, a scientist at the University of Beijing, will allow to explore up to four times more portions of space than the current most powerful radio telescopes.

Proposed more than twenty years ago by Chinese astronomers, it was completed in September 2016 and its cost amounts to 1.2 billion yuan (173 million dollars, 156 million euros ).

However, its construction meant that some 7,000 inhabitants of the area where it is located had to be relocated to another city about ten kilometers away to "guarantee the performance" of the telescope.

The stated objective of this apparatus is to look for the origin and evolution of the universe, through the application of interstellar molecules.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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