News and Views on “J.L. Han, et al., RAA 2021 Vol. 21 No. 5, 107: The FAST Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot survey: I. Project design and pulsar discoveries”

摘要

The newly commissioned Chinese radio telescope known as FAST is the most sensitive radio telescope in the world.The name FAST derives from its full title“Fivehundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope”giving a clue to why it is so sensitive.Even before the recent demise of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico,it had the largest collecting area of any“single-dish”radio telescope.Its 300-m effective diameter,combined with a very sensitive 19-beam receiver operating in the“Lband”around 1.4 GHz,makes it more than an order of magnitude more sensitive than any other existing radio telescope operating in this band.