World's Largest Radio Telescope Recorded Hundreds Of Mysterious Signals From Space

China has finished the installation of the biggest radio telescope in the world since 2017 but the availability of it still flies under the radar of us. However, the Chinese government also has some trouble with the full operation of this sensitive telescope.

FAST is the shortening word of Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, marked as a significant investment of the Chinese government in space science. As the name suggested, it flexes a fixed 500-meter diameter dish in Guizhou, China. Recently, it reportedly got some mysterious signals from the space and most of them are fast radio bursts (FRBs).

FRBs have been well-known as one of the greatest mysteries in modern astronomy. It was formed with powerful and bizarre flashes caused by high-energy astrophysical processes, which aren't yet understood by the human. Note that there were several bursts observed around the world since the first discovery in 2007. They’re believed to originated from billions of light-years far from Earth in the cosmos but last in a matter of milliseconds so that nobody can watch it under human eyes.

Due to the puzzling origin, noting the presence of FRBs is pretty hard. From late August to early September, FAST meanwhile picked up more than a hundred repeated bursts, marking the highest number of FRBs detected so far. By boasting a high-efficiency back-end system, it could measure and detect pulses in real-time as well as capture them parallel to other observational tasks. According to some scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, they expect to take advantage of its mechanism to shed light on the origin of FRBs in the near future.

In China, FAST was largely known as “Tianyan”, which stands for “Eye of the Sky”. With a ballpark figure of around $180 million, the sophisticated telescope has taken the title of world’s largest radio telescope from RATAN-600, which is now located in Zelenchukskaya, Russia.