The 500-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, known as the "China Tianyan", officially opened for operation on January 11, becoming the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope, according to a report by Xinhua on Saturday.
In October 2017, "China Tianyan" first discovered two pulsars. On January 11, 2020, it was announced that 102 pulsars have been found.
The pulsars it has discovered in more than two years have exceeded many European and American pulses The star search team found the sum of the numbers, the report said.
Tianyan literally means Eye of the Sky. It is a radio telescope located in the Dawodang depression, a natural basin in Pingtang County, Guizhou, southwest China.
This project is a major national science and technology infrastructure consisting of several parts, such as an active reflector system, a feed support system, a measurement and control system, a receiver and a terminal, and an observation base.
The reflective surface is composed of 4,450 reflective units with a total area of 250,000 square meters, which is equivalent to 30 standard football fields.
It uses a 30-ton feed tank to be controlled by 6 steel cables and can be positioned in real time within a range of 206 meters at an altitude of 140 meters.
It can see more distant and faint celestial bodies. The celestial bodies that can be found in China Tianyan can provide coordinates to a 100-meter radio telescope, and the other party can also see them in 9 minutes.
The accuracy is very high. The measurement angle on a 500-meter scale is accurate to 8 arc seconds. The positioning accuracy of 10 mm requires a maximum of 3.8 mm.
