China’s FAST Telescope Marks 10 Years, 1,300+ Pulsars
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), known as “China Sky Eye,” will mark the 10th anniversary of its commissioning on Friday, with astronomers announcing that the giant dish has discovered more than 1,300 pulsars—outnumbering the total found by all other international telescopes over the same period. The milestone, unveiled at an academic conference that opened Wednesday in Guizhou Province, underscores China’s rapid ascent in radio astronomy and its growing contribution to global astrophysics.
According to Xinhua, the telescope has produced a series of landmark scientific results spanning pulsars, neutral hydrogen galaxies, fast radio bursts (FRBs) and gravitational waves, establishing itself as one of the world’s most important astronomical observation facilities.
A Decade of Discovery
FAST, the world’s largest and most sensitive single-dish radio telescope, was inaugurated on September 25, 2016. Its 500-meter aperture and 4,450 reflector panels—set within a natural karst depression in Pingtang County—give it an observing sensitivity far beyond the legendary Arecibo Telescope, which dominated radio astronomy for half a century. After commissioning, the telescope passed national acceptance and began formal open operations in January 2020, opening its doors to the global scientific community.
“Ten years of dedicated work has secured China’s leading position in global radio astronomy,” FAST chief engineer Jiang Peng, also deputy director of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), said at the conference, per Xinhua’s English edition.
Jiang noted the telescope has steadily fulfilled its goal of yielding “early, abundant and high-quality” scientific outcomes and is now striving to produce landmark major achievements.
Pulsars—rapidly spinning neutron stars that serve as cosmic clocks—have been FAST’s signature contribution. Of the more than 1,300 discovered, Banyuetan, an investigative magazine published by Xinhua, reports that 170-plus are millisecond pulsars and more than 160 are pulsar binary systems, including the shortest-orbital-period binary pulsar system yet known.
Based on FAST’s observational results, researchers have published 13 papers in the top-tier journals Science and Nature. Its key achievements have been listed twice among Science’s Top 10 scientific breakthroughs, once among Nature’s Top 10 scientific discoveries, and ten times among China’s Top 10 scientific and technological advances.
China News Service reported that the anniversary conference drew more than 200 experts and scholars from over 40 universities and research institutions across China, including multiple academicians.
Breaking New Ground in Astrophysics
Beyond cataloging pulsars, FAST has pushed into some of the most competitive frontiers of modern physics.
In nanohertz gravitational wave research, Chinese scientists used high-precision timing of 57 millisecond pulsars to detect a gravitational wave signal at 4.6-sigma confidence using just over three years of data—a margin that exceeds the highest confidence achieved by parallel international efforts. FAST’s ultra-high sensitivity can improve pulsar timing precision to four to 50 times the previous global standard, potentially enabling the first detection of the nanohertz gravitational wave background, per Banyuetan.
In January 2026, an international team led by the Purple Mountain Observatory captured, for the first time, a sharp spike and subsequent drop in the Faraday rotation measure of a repeating fast radio burst, published in Science. As CGTN, via the Chinese Academy of Sciences, noted, the finding provided the strongest evidence yet that these mysterious cosmic flashes—each releasing in milliseconds the equivalent of the sun’s total output over a week—originate from binary star systems.
FAST’s neutral hydrogen survey has captured 156,000 neutral hydrogen galaxies, the world’s largest sample bank of its kind.
Self-Reliance in Core Technology
A quieter achievement lies behind the science: FAST’s decade-long push to replace imported components with domestically developed alternatives.
When construction began, many key parts relied on foreign suppliers—a vulnerability that the team has systematically addressed. In 2020, engineers began developing domestic hydraulic actuators to replace imported units; all 2,225 are now domestically produced. FAST’s measurement equipment once depended on imported laser total stations that failed during one-third of observation periods in Guizhou’s rain and fog. A domestically developed microwave ranging system entered trial use in April 2026, cutting per-set costs roughly in half and operating in all weather.
In 2026, the telescope completed a landmark domestic replacement of its feed-cabin steel cables—six cables totaling nearly four kilometers, previously supplied by a German brand. After three years of research and testing hundreds of sample cables, the domestic version met standards at nearly half the imported cost.
Jiang Peng told Banyuetan that almost all of FAST’s core equipment now has a clear domestic substitution plan, “completely getting rid of the stranglehold problem in the technology of large scientific facilities.”
What’s Next: FAST Phase II
At the 10-year mark, the team is not resting on its success. According to Global Times, FAST will advance its Phase II construction, which plans to build dozens of 40-meter-aperture antennas within a roughly 30-kilometer radius of the main dish, forming the world’s first hybrid-aperture radio interferometric array.
The upgrade aims to overcome the inherent resolution limits of a single-dish telescope, improving resolution to roughly 200 times the current level while retaining the 500-meter dish’s sensitivity advantage. Jiang has likened the current telescope to sketching a celestial body with a thick pencil, while the completed array would be “more like capturing it with a high-resolution digital camera.”
In July 2026, the FAST project won China’s 2025 National Science and Technology Progress Award, First Prize—a recognition of both its scientific output and its engineering achievement. Now, as the telescope enters its second decade, its team is setting its sights on cosmic origins, neutral hydrogen galaxy evolution, dark energy, and gravitational wave detection.
“China Sky Eye has brought China’s radio astronomy research into the international first tier,” Liu Bin, deputy director of FAST’s Science Observation and Data Department, told Banyuetan, “and has enabled Chinese astronomers to stand at the very forefront of humanity’s gaze into the universe for the first time.”