The 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), dubbed "China Tianyan", is undergoing an equipment upgrade and is expected to officially launch its search for extraterrestrial civilizations in September.
Professor Zhang Tongjie, a member of the Cosmology and Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group at the Department of Astronomy, Beijing Normal University, revealed this information.
"China Tianyan" installed and commissioned back-end equipment dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial civilizations in 2018, the main role of which is to filter out useful narrow-band candidate signals from observed electromagnetic signals while excluding celestial and man-made signals.
And because of the co-temporal mode of observation, the alien search will not interfere with the normal scientific observations of the "China Tianyan".
The equipment was developed by researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory, the University of California, Berkeley, Beijing Normal University and other units, and has been proven to be very effective, with high resolution and excellent processing ability for cosmic noise.
To date, Chinese scientists have published three papers related to the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, including the first research results of "China Tianyan", the quantitative outlook of "China Tianyan" for the exploration of extraterrestrial civilizations and the theoretical study of extraterrestrial civilizations.
Professor Zhang Tongjie is also a member of the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) Standing Committee on the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations (IAA SETI) and a scientist of the China Extraterrestrial Civilizations Search (SETI).
SETI is currently the largest and most well-known extraterrestrial civilization search project, launched in 1999 to search for extraterrestrial civilization signals using idle resources of the global computer distributed computing project SETI@home, which was just suspended in March this year.
The 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the world's first single-aperture radio telescope built using potholes in the karst region of Guizhou as a telescope site, has a reception area the size of 30 standard football fields and will remain world-class for the next 20 to 30 years.
The new design idea, combined with the advantage of a unique site, has enabled it to break the telescope's 100-meter engineering limit and create a new model for building giant radio telescopes.
And the search for extraterrestrial civilizations was supposed to be one of FAST's seven scientific goals.
1. FAST has the ability to extend neutral hydrogen observations to the edge of the universe and reproduce early cosmic images.
2, can spend a year to discover thousands of pulsars, establish pulsar timing array, participate in the future pulsar autonomous navigation, and gravitational wave detection.
3. Leading the international very long baseline interferometric network to obtain superfine structures of celestial bodies.
4、High-resolution microwave patrol to detect faint spatial signals.
5、Participate in the search for extraterrestrial civilization.
6、Participate in meridian chain engineering to improve the performance of non-coherent scattering radar dual system.
7. Extension of deep space communications capabilities to planets at the outer edges of the solar system and a 100-fold increase in satellite data reception capabilities.
