The National Astronomical Observatories (NAO) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced on October 10 that China’s FAST, the 500-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, has for the first time detected several dozen pulsars, six of which have been verified internationally.
It is the first achievement made by FAST, the world’s largest single dish radio telescope which was put into operation in 2016. The NAO revealed that two of the pulsars were detected in August, one 4,100 light years from Earth, and the other 16,000 light years away.
Scientists say pulsars come from stellar evolution and supernova outburst, and they are a kind of neutron star of great significance in detecting gravitational waves, the ripples produced by the warping of space-time predicted by Albert Einstein. On October 16, many scientists worldwide, including those from China, detected gravitational waves, which, according to scientists, were produced by the collision of two neutron stars.
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