THE BIG IRON WOK HUNTING ALIENS AND NATIONAL PRIDE
If ET phones Earth, China might get the call as it has the world’s largest single-dish telescope to explore the universe’s mysteries
When hundreds of engineers and builders began clambering up a jagged hill in southwestern China to assemble a giant telescope in a deep, bowlshaped basin, poor villagers sometimes crept over the sheer slopes to glimpse the country’s latest technological wonder.
“We’ve never seen anything like it, never imagined it,” said one villager, Huang Zhangrong, a sun-gnarled 66-year-old carpenter. “It’s a big circle, a big iron wok.”
The wok is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, and it officially began operating last Sunday, accompanied by jubilant national television coverage, after more than five years of construction. The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, Fast for short, is intended to project China’s scientific ambitions deep into the universe, bringing back dramatic discoveries and honours like Nobel Prizes. Maybe even messages from aliens. The telescope, which is in a majestic but impoverished part of Guizhou province, embodies China’s plans to rise as a scientific power. The dish is made of 4,450 intricately positioned triangular panels and has a collecting area of 195,000 square metres, equal to almost 450 basketball courts. At 500 metres in diameter, it will be roughly twice as sensitive as the world’s next-biggest single-dish radio telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which is 305 metres across. The telescope will help China make “major advances and breakthroughs at the frontier of science”, President Xi Jinping said in a congratulatory message on Sunday. He called it China’s “eye in the sky”.
Astronomers will use the Guizhou telescope to map the shape and formation of the universe, relying on its large size and a mobile detector suspended above the dish to explore space more quickly, deeply and thoroughly than they can with smaller telescopes. The telescope cost $184 million (6.37 billion baht), recent Chinese state news reports said, although that figure seems unduly modest, given the telescope’s size. To ensure the project remains undisturbed, the government is moving more than 9,000 people.
Chinese science is often seen as serving the country’s economic and military expansion, seeking ruthlessly practical dividends. But the telescope shows Beijing is also willing to spend heavily to propel China into the big leagues in research that offers few direct payoffs, apart from knowledge and prestige.
“Astronomy is an ultimate expression of ‘pure’ science that has little immediate practical benefits,” Luis C Ho, director of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, said by email. “It is a luxury that only the most advanced economies enjoy.”
China’s history of subjugation to the West in previous centuries reinforced the belief that scientific prowess is essential for any modern power. And studying the heavens was, after all, an area where China excelled in ancient times.
“Now we’re racing to catch up and want to recreate the glories of our ancestors by reviving our astronomy,” Zhang Chengmin, an astrophysicist at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in an interview. “China isn’t just an economic power; it is also becoming a scientific power.”
Astronomy, however, also depends on international cooperation. Despite Chinese hoopla about the telescope as homegrown technology, it also uses foreign equipment. The receiver, a crucial part, is Australian technology. Foreign scientists will be invited to work on research, and many of the telescope’s big projects will draw on international collaboration.
“Radio astronomy is a very international field,” said Douglas Bock, a senior astronomer at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, which built the receiver. “The science collaborations naturally lead to many deeper technical collaborations on instrumentation and new telescopes.”
Using the new reach of the telescope in Guizhou, astronomers hope to better measure the distribution of neutral hydrogen atoms, like a telltale cosmic dust.
“Previous research could only tell us that the universe is expanding,” said Zhang Tongjie, a professor of cosmology at Beijing Normal University who plans to use the telescope.
If the telescope can be used to survey electromagnetic radiation from neutral hydrogen, he said, Chinese scientists would be well positioned to gain a much more accurate grasp of how fast the universe is expanding. “That would be very significant,” he said.
Astronomers also hope to use the telescope to locate thousands more pulsars, the highly magnetised neutron stars that rotate, creating a metronome-like pulse that is a boon to measurements. By better measuring pulsars, and more of them, the telescope could open up a new way to explore the long-elusive gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Most alluring to the public may be the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, from signals that accidentally reach Earth or from messages sent here. The new telescope opens up the possibility that the first human leader to respond to a message from alien life could be Mr Xi.
But alien life is not a focus for now. Initially, the scientists running the telescope will scan the skies to test and calibrate their equipment, and researchers involved in the international effort to explore for intelligent life on distant planets will “piggyback” to sift for signals, said Dan Werthimer, chief scientist of the Seti Research Centre at the University of California, Berkeley.
“They’re very keen to collaborate. We can use the telescope at the same time that they’re doing more traditional astronomy to look for ET.”
But astronomers said it could be years before t he telescope i n Guizhou starts making breakthroughs.
“It would be premature to want to catch up with international standards in one jump,” said Wu Xuebing, a professor of astrophysics at Peking University.