Beam receivers to help FAST’s sensitivity

Telescope will be able to receive weaker, farther radio signals: expert

The ability of the world’s largest aperture-filled radio telescope, the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), will become more sensitive to radio signals with the help of 19 new beam receivers.

These 19 beam receivers will be put into use to allow the telescope to detect weaker and farther radio signals, Liu Zhijie, deputy chief of FAST’s data center, was quoted as saying by the Science and Technology Daily on Monday.

FAST, which is located in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province, is believed to be the world’s most sensitive radio telescope, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Its tasks include observing pulsars, exploring interstellar molecules and monitoring interstellar communication signals.

A telescope can receive various signals from the universe, while beam receivers helps scientists deal with these signals in a more specific and comprehensive way, because the beam receivers can obtain data on pulsars, celestial spectrums and fast radio bursts in one scan, Jiao Weixin, a space science professor at Peking University, told the Global Times on Monday.

The receivers would also make it possible for the telescope to search a larger portion of the sky for hidden matter, Jiao said, Jiao said.

Several radio telescopes ranging from 30 to 50 meters will also be built around FAST to help improve its resolution ratio and allow it to capture clearer pictures, Liu said.

Jiao said that scientists cannot immediately process data captured by the telescope. Sometimes it takes decades to make breakthroughs from old data, so they need to be preserved for a long time, he noted.

Liu said that the center has to improve its current condition to embrace the new equipment. It invested millions of yuan to buy hardware facilities, a central apparatus room and other equipment to expand its storage and calculating ability.

In early 2017, Guizhou was planning to build a data processing laboratory for FAST, Xinhua reported. Construction of the lab would take three years. It would recruit scientists and develop astronomical data processing and analysis software after it is built.

After more than a year of tests, FAST has realized myriad ways of observation, such as real-time tracking and drift scanning which has surpassed other telescopes of its kind worldwide, Science and Technology Daily reported.

Since FAST began trial operations in September 2016, it has discovered 51 stars which bear features similar to pulsars, and 11 of which have been confirmed as new pulsars by observatories in other countries, according to Xinhua.

Looking for aliens is also one of the goals of FAST. “But we haven’t started that kind of search during the debugging and trial period,” Li Di, chief scientist of the Radio Astronomy Division of the National Astronomical Observatories, was quoted by Xinhua as saying.