It seems that China will steal the thunder from the Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner-led consortium that aims to find extraterrestrials, as the Asian country announced that it is building the world's biggest radio telescope to "listen" to the universe.
Hawking and Milner founded a group of scientists and technologists in an initiative called Breakthrough Listen, HNGN previously reported. They will, however, rent some of the world's powerful telescopes to scan the cosmos and pick up signs of life.
China, on the other hand, will build its own gigantic radio telescope the size of 30 football fields, the Daily Mail has learned.
Dubbed the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the project is currently being constructed in the Guizhou province, in China's southwestern region. The telescope will be made of 4,450 reflective panels, which will be held together by cables that also control coordinates. The People's Daily Online learned that the FAST telescope can pick up signals beyond the solar system. It can also reportedly help prove Albert Einstein's relativity theory, a Chinese physicist told the Daily Mail.
Lest skeptics start claiming that the telescope is a copycat to the Hawking-Milner project, officials are quick to explain that the initiative was already proposed in 1993, and construction itself commenced when it was approved in 2006.
The project, which cost 1.2 billion yuan ($193 million), is expected to be finished in September 2016. Upon its completion, FAST will take the title of the world's most powerful telescope, which is currently held by the U.S.'s Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, Value Walk reported.
