China Builds World’s Biggest Telescope to Look for Aliens

China has just put the finishing touches on its gargantuan single-aperture radio telescope– the largest of its kind– which will be used to hunt for extraterrestrial life. Spanning the area covered by thirty football fields and composed of 4450 individual triangular panels, the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is a massive disc nestled snugly in a bowl-shaped valley in China’s Guizhou Province.

The $185 million contraption is capable of reading radio waves over 1,000 light years away, allowing scientists to listen to space phenomena such as black holes, quasars, and pulsars, all of which emit radio waves. Also, aliens, if they are advanced enough.

Listening for radio waves emitted by alien technology is one of the most common ways of searching for advanced extraterrestrial life, which is a field known as SETI. In fact, for the past eighty years, humans have been unintentionally broadcasting radio waves past Earth’s atmosphere and into space and it is generally thought that an intelligent alien civilization would do the same.

Aside from detecting alien activity, observing pulsars, the high-density collapsed cores of exploding stars, are of particular interest to the astronomers behind the project who hope to identify more of these celestial bodies outside of our galaxy.

The People’s Daily China tweeted a collection of photos that give you a sense of the scale of the effort, which required clearing a large valley of vegetation and relocating 9,000 residents before installing the telescope. The telescope’s isolated rural locale is important, ensuring that there will be no interference or magnetic disruptions from nearby locals.

Zheng Xiaonian, head of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, announced that the telescope would likely commence operations in September after all the bugs and kinks have been tested and worked out.

It is expected that FAST will be occasionally used by other countries and participate in Europe’s Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network, which links radio telescopes around the world to create one large telescope with an effective diameter the size of a planet.