International Students Visit World's Largest Single-dish Radio Telescope in China
"I didn't expect the telescope can be so gigantic." Forty international students recently visited China's five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, constructed in 2016. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are one of the greatest mysteries of our universe. FAST has already reported the largest set of FRB events ever detected in history. For example, between August and October 2019, the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in southwestern China recorded a total of 1,652 such brief and bright outbursts from a single repeating FRB source in a dwarf galaxy three billion light years away.
“The study is very thorough, with a level of details and sensitivity we’ve never had before,” says astrophysicist Emily Petroff from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and McGill University in Canada
Coming from deep space, these fast radio bursts can flash and fade in a matter of milliseconds, yet in each instance can release as much energy as the sun does in a year. They pop up all across the sky multiple times a day, but most appear to be one-off events and are thus hard to catch. First discovered in 2007, FRBs have challenged and tantalized scientists seeking to uncover their obscure origins and to use them as unique tools for probing the depths of intergalactic space.
The primary driving force behind the FAST project was Nan Rendong, a researcher with the Chinese National Astronomical Observatory, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He held the positions of chief scientist and chief engineer of the project. He died September 15, 2017, in Boston due to lung cancer.
Credit: New China TV
Acknowledgements: Scientific American Magazine
Duration: 1 minute, 20 seconds
Release Date: June 10, 2023
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