The 500-meter Spherical Aperture Telescope, known as FAST, stands in a natural depression surrounded by small forested peaks, in a rugged region of Guizhou province, one of the poorest in China. Radio transmissions are prohibited within 5 kilometers of the facilities, in which the authorities of the Asian country have invested almost 170 million euros and which have taken five years of work – the Government has relocated some 8,000 people during the process -.
The FAST radio telescope exceeds that of Arecibo , in Puerto Rico, by almost 200 meters in diameter. From the latter, on November 16, 1974, a message was sent to the Hercules cluster, about 25,000 light years away, with information about the position of the Solar System, the Earth and our species. In fact, the search for signs of intelligent alien life will be one of the tasks of FAST – for this, it will focus on the regions of the sky where exoplanets located in the habitable zone of their systems have been located -, which, according to its developers , doubles in sensitivity to Arecibo.
In addition, it will allow progress in the study of gravitational waves, know in detail the distribution of atomic hydrogen in the Milky Way, discover new galaxies and observe astronomical sources of radio waves, such as pulsars.
The FAST radio telescope is the largest made up of a single disk, although the Russian Ratan-600, made up of 895 reflectors and inaugurated in 1974, has a larger diameter of 576 meters . The Chinese, for its part, has 4,450 triangular shaped panels that are aligned to form a paraboloid of revolution, that is, the one that results from the rotation of a parabola around its axis. Therefore, although it is much larger than Arecibo, its useful area is reduced to 300 meters, similar to that of Puerto Rico. The signals bounce off it and go to a mobile booth, located between 140 and 160 meters above the plate, where the receivers are located.
Image: FAST
