China Sky Eye FAST has achieved several blockbuster results, discovering about 500 pulsars

IT House January 6 news, according to Xinhua News Agency reported that the 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST), known as the "China Sky Eye", has been officially accepted for nearly two years. The operational efficiency and quality of "China Tianyan" have been continuously improved, and the annual observation time has exceeded 5300 hours, which has far exceeded the work efficiency expected by international counterparts and played an important supporting role in its scientific output. On January 5, the Chinese Academy of Sciences released the news that in 2021, scientists have achieved a number of important scientific research achievements relying on the "Chinese Heavenly Eye".

Neutral hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, widely present at different times in the universe, and is one of the best tracers for the distribution of matter at different scales. The international cooperation team led by Qing Daochong and Li Jing of the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences used the original neutral hydrogen narrow line self-absorption method to use FAST to obtain the high-confidence Zeman effect measurements in the nucleus envelope of the protostar for the first time, which provided important observation evidence for solving the "magnetic flux problem", one of the three classic problems of star formation.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are the brightest radio bursts in the universe, with unknown origins, and are one of the newest hotspots in astronomy. The international cooperation team led by Li Ming, Wang Pei and Zhu Weiwei of the National Astronomical Observatory used FAST to observe the fast radio burst FRB121102, detected 1652 burst events in about 50 days, obtained the largest sample of fast radio burst event to date, exceeded the total number of outbreak events published in all previous articles in the field, and revealed for the first time the complete energy spectrum of the rapid radio burst rate and its bimodal structure.

The discovery of pulsars is one of the main scientific targets of observations by large international radio telescopes. In less than two years, the FAST Major Priority Project "Silver Road Surface Pulsar Snapshot Survey" led by Han Jinlin of the National Astronomical Observatory has discovered 279 new pulsars, of which 65 are millisecond pulsars and 22 are in binary systems. To date, FAST has discovered about 500 pulsars, making it the most efficient device in the world since its operation.

IT House learned that in March 2021, FAST was officially opened to the world, and 27 international projects in 14 countries (excluding China) have been approved and scientific observations have been launched. Wu Xiangping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory, revealed that "China's Sky Eye" is considering taking 1% of the observation time to open to primary and secondary school students across the country. "Primary and secondary school students can come up with good scientific ideas and professional astronomers can help them realize them."