![]() That work had begun even before the participants arrived. So at the Radio Astronomy Conference, Stierwalt and the other visitors shared how FAST could benefit from their instruments, and vice versa, and talked about how to run big projects. And single-dish radio telescopes like FAST see the bigger picture: They can map out the gas inside of and surrounding galaxies. X-ray observatories pick out black holes. Infrared instruments reveal dust and older stars. “Each gives a different piece of the puzzle,” she says. Stierwalt studies interacting dwarf galaxies, and while she’s a staff scientist at Caltech/IPAC, she uses telescopes all over. But they weren’t just subject experts: Many were logistical wizards, having worked on multiple instruments and large surveys, and with substantial and dispersed teams. The visiting astronomers had worked with telescopes that have contributed to understanding of hydrogen emissions, pulsars, powerful bursts, and distant galaxies. And the relatively new crop of radio astronomers running the telescope were hungry for advice about how to run such a massive research instrument. It was still far from fully operational-engineers are still trying to perfect, for instance, the motors that push and pull its surface into shape, allowing it to point and focus correctly. See, FAST’s opening had been more ceremony than science (the commissioning phase is officially scheduled to end by September 2019). In September 2016, FAST received its “first light,” from a pulsar 1,351 light-years away, during its official opening.Ī year later, Stierwalt and the other visiting scientists arrived in Pingtang, and after an evening of touring Astronomy Town, they got down to business. They do things fast in China: The team finished the telescope in just five years. Four years later, construction began in one of China’s poorest regions, in the karst hills of the southwestern part of the country. In 2007, China’s National Development and Reform Commission allocated $90 million for the project, with $90 million more streaming in from other agencies. Undeterred, Chinese astronomers set out to build their own powerful instrument. But in 2006, the international SKA committee dismissed China, and then chose to set up its distributed mondo-telescope in South Africa and Australia instead. In the early 2000s, China angled to host the Square Kilometre Array, a collection of coordinated radio antennas whose dishes would be scattered over thousands of miles. FAST has been in the making for a long time.
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