On January 5, the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a press conference to release the operation of China's Tianyan FAST and a series of important scientific achievements. Since its completion, China Tianyan FAST has continuously improved its operational efficiency and quality, with an annual observation time of more than 5,300 hours. So far, FAST has discovered about 500 pulsars, making it the most efficient device in the world since its operation.
Put on your headphones first
Listen to "surround sound" from the universe
The picture shows the flickering diagram of a fast radio storm in the FAST night sky (video screenshot). Courtesy of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Millisecond pulsars are continuously discovered
Pulsars are the "remains" of massive stars after their death, with a sugar cube-sized volume of hundreds of millions of tons of mass, and pulsars can emit highly periodic pulses with periods ranging from 1.4 milliseconds to 23 seconds. The discovery of pulsars is one of the main scientific targets of observations by large international radio telescopes.
FAST's major priority project "Silver Road Surface Pulsar Snapshot Survey" has completed 8% of the planned search for the sky area in less than two years, accumulatively observing about 620 machines, and so far the project has discovered 279 new pulsars, of which 65 are millisecond pulsars and 22 in binary systems. The number of pulsars discovered in the year and a half of the work has surpassed the results of a 15-year search by the Arecibo Telescope in the United States.
At the press conference, Han Jinlin, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory, introduced that FAST is equipped with a 19-beam L-band receiver, which is the world's most powerful pulsar search weapon.
To solve one of the three classic problems of star formation
Provide significant observational evidence
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 used the original neutral hydrogen narrow line self-absorption method to use the "Chinese Tianyan" to obtain the high-confidence Zeman effect measurement in the protostar nuclear envelope 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 captured with FAST
Compose sonic music
Fast radio bursts are currently the brightest explosive phenomena in the radio band of the known universe, with unknown origin, and are also one of the largest astronomical hotspot frontiers today. From August to October 2019, FAST successfully captured samples of the largest rapid burst event to date, and the paper was published in the journal Nature on October 14, 2021.
On January 5, the Chinese Academy of Sciences reviewed this achievement at the "China Sky Eye" 2021 Important Results Conference and showed the sonic music based on the radio wave waveforms in this collection of rapid radio burst events.
According to reports, fast radio burst 121102 is the first repeated burst known to mankind, FAST successfully captured its extreme activity period, the most intense period reached 122 outbreaks per hour, the cumulative acquisition of a total of 1652 high signal-to-noise ratio of the burst signal, becoming the largest collection of fast radio burst burst events, more than the sum of all previous articles published in the field of the outbreak event, becoming a milestone in the systematic study of rapid radio burst repeated outbreaks.
"China Sky Eye" intends to observe 1% of the time
Open to primary and secondary school students
It is understood that fast priority and major scientific projects in 2021 account for 50% of the total observation time. Since FAST was officially opened to the world, 27 international projects in 14 countries were approved and scientific observations were launched in August 2021. In the future, FAST will continue to operate with high quality, carry out scientific observations such as searching for pulsars and detecting gravitational waves, and plans to open 1% of the observation time to primary and secondary school students across the country in 2022, and primary and secondary school students will put forward scientific ideas and be helped by astronomers to help them realize them.
Chang Jin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the National Astronomical Observatory, introduced that in future observations, FAST will be committed to finding sub-millisecond pulsars of less than 1 millisecond, which is also a system that the world is looking for; the second is to look for double stars composed of pulsars and black holes; the third point is the neutral hydrogen survey, which is the most advantageous place of FAST, its sensitivity is high, and it is expected to achieve major results in neutral hydrogen survey.
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