(September 25, 2016) Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is the most advanced radio telescope ever built by humans with a dish of 500 m across, and is now the largest filled-in, single-dish radio telescope in the world.
Located in remote mountainous region in southwestern China to ensure the area would be free from radio interference, the radio telescope was able to successfully observe a pulsar at a distance of 1,351 light years in a test last month.
Proposed by Chinese scientists in 1994, the project was approved by the government in 2007 and the construction of FAST began in 2011. The Chinese government relocated almost 10,000 people before the construction started. The cost of the project was nearly 1.2 billion-yuan ($180 million). The telescope will be used to study dark matter, gravitational waves, pulsars, and fast radio bursts.
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