China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), the world’s largest single-dish and most sensitive radio telescope, has received applications from 15 foreign countries and approved a total of nearly 900 hours of observation access for foreign research teams since March 31, 2021.
According to Sun Chun, engineer in charge of measurement and control of the FAST, the 15 countries include Germany, Italy and France, and the applications mainly involve fast radio burst observations, pulsar observations, and neutral hydrogen surveys.
Having earned a doctorate in pulsar astrophysics at the University of Manchester, British astronomer Ralph Eatough works as a pulsar astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Eatough said opening up the FAST to the world means that now astronomers have the possibility to perform experiments that were previously not possible due to insufficient telescope sensitivity, and that a prime example is the potential to detect pulsars located in external galaxies.
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