China’s FAST telescope has identified over 1,000 pulsars

GUIYANG – China’s Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), the world’s largest filled-aperture radio telescope and most sensitive, has identified more than 1,000 new pulsars, its operator said Tuesday.

According to the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), the number of new pulsars discovered by the FAST spacecraft has exceeded the number of all foreign telescopes combined during the same period.

Pulsars, or rapidly spinning neutron stars, are formed by the implosion of the cores of massive dying stars in supernova explosions.

Han Jinlin, a scientist at NAOC, explained that since each pulsar has its own pulse and rotation frequency, it is a bit like a beacon in the universe.

If humans can travel to other planets in the future, pulsars could be used as a navigation system, Han added.

“We can accurately measure the coordinates of pulsars in the universe and monitor the phase positions of the pulsar signals and the corresponding position relationships, so people will not get lost during interstellar travel,” Han explained.

The pulsars identified by FAST include many binary pulsars and millisecond pulsars, increasing both the diversity and number of pulsars studied and contributing to human understanding of their formation and evolution.

The telescope, placed in a naturally deep and circular karst depression in southwest China’s Guizhou Province, has a reception area equivalent to 30 standard soccer fields.

FAST formally began operations in January 2020, and officially opened to the world in March 2021.