World's largest radio telescope starts operating in China

[Zorro]

The world's largest radio telescope began operating in southwestern China Sunday, a project Beijing says will help humanity search for alien life.

The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), nestled between hills in the mountainous region of Guizhou, began working around noon, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Built at a cost of 1.2 billion yuan ($180 million), the telescope dwarfs the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico as the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, with twice the sensitivity and a reflector as large as 30 football fields, it said.

FAST will use its vast dish, made up of 4,450 panels, to search for signs of intelligent life, and to observe distant pulsars -- tiny, rapidly spinning neutron stars believed to be the products of supernova explosions.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/worlds-largest-radio-telescope-starts-operating-china-072255142.html

[longship]

1. And the US is currently trying to shutdown Arecibo.

It is like when we shut down the Tevatron at Fermilab, the second largest particle accelerator on the planet.

I guess if we cannot be number one, we'll settle for number zero.

And don't get me started about the Superconducting Supercollider.

And the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea is being held up by people who believe in volcano gods, people whose ancestors traversed the Pacific Ocean in canoes to settle in Hawaii by using stellar navigation, for Christ sakes!

[DavidDvorkin]

2. I assume it's non-steerable

Even so, its findings are sure to be exciting.