CHINA’S Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, will open to global scientists and accept observation applications from astronomers starting today.

Located in a naturally deep and round karst depression in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province, the telescope officially began operating Jan. 11, 2020 and has identified over 300 pulsars so far.

Dubbed “China Sky Eye,” the telescope is also the world’s most sensitive radio telescope. It is about 2.5 times more sensitive than the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the second-largest single-dish radio telescope in the world.

Using FAST, Chinese astronomers have detected repeated fast radio bursts (FRB), mysterious signals believed to be from a source about 3 billion light years from Earth in 2019, according to researchers at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (CGTN, Xinhua)