China bowl that can search for alien life
IF THE truth is out there, China is determined to find it with a radio telescope, to be switched on today, which astronomers have described as a “game changer” in the search for extraterrestrial life.
The world’s largest star gazer will allow China to look further into space than any nation has before. The dish, which is known as Fast (Five-hundredmetre Aperture Spherical Telescope), is made up of 4,450 triangular panels, and is nestled in a valley in the southwestern Guizhou province.
It not only dwarfs the next biggest dish, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which is 300m wide, but it is also 10 times more sensitive, according to Zheng Xiaonian, deputy director of China’s National Astronomical Observatories, which constructed Fast.
The £140million telescope seeks to unlock answers on the evolution of the universe through studying the distribution of neutral hydrogen, and it will also gather data on phenomena including pulsars and black holes.
But it is the ability of the gargantuan dish to hunt for extraterrestrial life which has some scientists excited. “Past efforts have been described as someone walking to the edge of the ocean, dipping in a glass and concluding there are no fish,” said Jane Johnson, professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. But now “a more thorough search is possible,” the expert on the Chinese space programme added.
It has taken more than two decades for Fast to become a reality.
The project was first mooted in 1993 but it was 10 years until scientists settled on an appropriate site – a large, round depression surrounded by verdant hills about 100 miles south of the city of Guiyang.
The mountains created an equilateral triangle, meaning that the dish could be positioned into the valley like an egg in an egg cup, without the need to dig.
Dr Douglas Vakoch, president of Meti International, an organisation that promotes sending messages into space in the hope of finding alien life, said the dish would be able to “churn through the cosmic static, looking for the telltale signs of intelligence”.
“Fast will look for signs of advanced extraterrestrial civilisations in the vicinity of other stars, seeking radio signals that stand out as unlike anything that the universe can create,” Dr Vakoch said.
It is a “game-changer in the search for life in the universe”, he added.