CHINA’S FAST TELESCOPE
WHY IN NEWS ?
- China’s FAST telescope found key evidence for the existence of nanohertz gravitational waves, which is important in studying problems in contemporary astrophysics such as supermassive black holes, the history of galaxy mergers, and the formation of large-scale structures in the universe.
ABOUT FAST TELESCOPE:
- The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), located in a karst depression in Guizhou, 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.
- With its innovation design, FAST has broken the 100-meter engineering limit for telescopes construction and created a new mode to build large radio telescopes.
- FAST has a reflecting surface 500 meters in diameter located in a natural sinkhole in the karst rock landscape, focusing radio waves on a receiving antenna in a “feed cabin” suspended 140 m (460 ft) above it.
- The reflector is made of perforated aluminium panels supported by a mesh of steel cables hanging from the rim.
- Its working frequency ranges from 70 MHz to 3.0 GHz,with the upper limit set by the precision with which the primary can approximate a parabola.
- A five-kilometre zone near the telescope forbids tourists from using mobile phones and other radio-emitting devices.
- It has a novel design, using an active surface made of 4,500 metal panels which form a moving parabola shape in real time.
OBJECTIVES OF FAST TELESCOPE:
- Detect neutral hydrogen to the edge of the universe, reconstruct the images of the early universe;
- Discover pulsar, 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. Detect weak space signals;
- Participate in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SYLLABUS: PRELIMS, CURRENT AFFAIRS