China hunts for scientific glory, and aliens, with new telescope
PINGTANG COUNTY, China — When hundreds of engineers and builders began clambering up a jagged hill in southwest China to assemble a giant telescope in a deep, bowl- shaped 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 of the villagers, 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 on Sunday, accompanied by jubilant national television coverage, after more than five years of construction. The “Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope,” FAST for short, is intended to project China’s scientific ambitions deep into the universe, bringing back dramatic discoveries and honors such as 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 2.1 million square feet, equal to almost 450 basketball courts. At 1,640 feet 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 1,000 feet across.
The telescope will help China make “major advances and breakthroughs at the frontier of science,” President Xi Jinping of China said in a congratulatory message 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 smaller telescopes. The telescope cost $184 million, recent Chinese state media reports said, although that figure seems unduly modest, given its size. To ensure the project remains undisturbed, more than 9,000 people are being moved by the government.
Chinese science is often seen as serving the country’s economic and military expansion, seeking ruthlessly practical dividends.
But the telescope shows the government in Beijing is also willing to spend heavily to propel China high 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.