How-to China: Sky eye wide open

Editor's Note: The eyes of the world are turning to China. In this ongoing series How-to China, we tell stories about how Chinese approaches promote understanding and solve problems around the globe and how Chinese and foreign cultures meet and mingle.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, or FAST — the world's largest single-dish radio telescope — is revealing wonders of the cosmos at an astonishing rate.

Listed among China's top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2021 by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the telescope has placed China in the pole position for space studies worldwide.

Located in a karst depression in Qiannan Bouyei and Miao autonomous prefecture of Guizhou province, FAST has a receiving area equivalent to 30 soccer pitches and is able to detect distant and dark celestial bodies through real-time positioning.

FAST has found 500 new pulsars — four times the number found by all other telescopes over the same period in the world combined, according to the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Annual observation time has exceeded 5,300 hours, which is far more than similar devices globally.