About the FAST Telescope:
- The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), is located in a karst depression in Guizhou, China.
- It is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, with a receiving area equivalent to 30 football fields.
- It is expected that FAST will maintain its world-class status for the next 20 to 30 years.
- Goals:
- Detect neutral hydrogen to the edge of the universe, and reconstruct the images of the early universe.
- Discover pulsars, establish a pulsar timing array, and participate in pulsar navigation and gravitational wave detection in the future.
- Join the International Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Network to obtain hyperfine structures of celestial bodies.
- Perform high-resolution radio spectral survey. Detecting weak space signals.
- Participate in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
What are pulsars?
- A pulsar is a highly magnetised, rotating neutron star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation.
- These beams are observed as regular pulses of radio waves, hence the name "pulsar". Pulsars are incredibly dense and have a mass greater than that of the Sun, packed into a sphere with a diameter of about 20 kilometres.
Supernova Remnants
- These are the aftermath of massive star explosions.
- When a star reaches the end of its life, it undergoes a supernova explosion, releasing an enormous amount of energy and scattering its outer layers into space.
- The remnants of these explosions contain various elements and provide valuable insights into the processes occurring during stellar evolution.
