China has started assembling the World’s largest radio telescope, whose dish has the size of 30 football grounds. The telescope is being assembled in the mountains of southwest Guizhou Province to enhance its ability to observe outer space. The five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) nestles in a bowl-shaped valley.
On completion, FAST will be the world’s largest radio telescope (single-aperture), overtaking the Arecibo Observatory in the US territory of Puerto Rico, which is 305 metres (1000 feet) in diameter. With a perimeter of about 1.6 km, it will take about 40 minutes to walk around the telescope. Construction on the telescope started in March 2011 and is scheduled to finish next year.
- A radio telescope is similar to the radio in a car, but is much bigger, more sensitive and able to create a visual picture of the signals it receives.
- Radio telescopes create a picture of the sky, not in visible light, but in radio waves.
- The radio telescope is used to detect most of the things that an optical telescope can not see.
- Radio telescopes, like reflecting telescopes, have a big dish to collect and focus data. At the center of its dish, a radio telescope has an antenna which picks up radio signals.
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