World's largest telescope under construction

You have full access to this article via your institution. Download PDF China has begun building the biggest radio telescope in the world, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope

(FAST). Sitting in a natural bowl-shaped depression in a remote region of Guizhou province, southwestern China, FAST is due to be completed in 2014. China's National Astronomical

Observatories will use the exquisite resolution of the 700-million-yuan (US$102-million) facility to identify distant pulsars and galaxies in the low-gigahertz range of the radio spectrum.

FAST will unseat the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico as the biggest single eye on the sky — although it will not be able to match the resolution of multiple-antenna telescopes such as

the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile (currently under construction). RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT

THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE World's largest telescope under construction. _Nature_ 457, 648 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/457648d Download citation * Published: 04 February 2009 *

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