World's largest dish radio telescope: detected two pulsars during its test confirmed scientists
The world's largest dish radio telescope has detected two pulsars during its test, scientists confirmed. The FAST 500 meter Aperture Scope Telescope, located in a rural part of China's Guizhou province, achieved the first light of the first use of a telescope in September 2016. Once fully operational, the telescope will be used to try to solve some of the greatest mysteries of the universe. One of its main missions is to detect signals of interstellar communication, or, simply, messages of alien civilizations.
Another primary objective is to observe the neutron stars that rotate the pulsars. These are some of the densest objects in the universe. They are the remains of the gravitational collapse of massive stars, accumulating a mass amount of 1.4 solar masses in a sphere that measures only 12 miles in diameter. On Earth, a teaspoon of matter from a neutron star would weigh more than a billion tons. The study of pulsars, named because they seem to pulsate as they spin, provides scientists with a natural laboratory to observe some of the most extreme conditions in the universe.
