China’s FAST Telescope Marks 10 Years of Cosmic Discovery

China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), known as “China Sky Eye,” marks the 10th anniversary of its completion on September 25, 2026, capping a decade in which the world’s largest and most sensitive single-dish radio telescope has discovered more than 1,300 pulsars and reshaped humanity’s view of deep space. According to Xinhua, the milestone was celebrated at an academic exchange conference held in Pingtang County, Guizhou Province, from September 22 to 24.

Completed and operational since September 25, 2016, FAST sits inside a natural karst depression called Dawodang in Guizhou’s mountainous south. In ten years it has grown from a bold engineering gamble into one of the world’s most important astronomical observation facilities.

A Decade of Landmark Results

The numbers tell much of the story. As of September 2026, FAST has discovered more than 1,300 pulsars — exceeding the combined total found by all other international telescopes over the same period, according to the Xinhua wire report. Based on FAST data, scientists have published 13 papers in the main journals of Science and Nature. FAST-related results have been selected twice among Science’s Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs, once among Nature’s Top 10 Scientific Discoveries, and ten times among China’s Top 10 Science Advances.

“After ten years of cultivation, FAST has driven China’s radio astronomy to achieve a historic leap from following, to catching up, to leading the world,” said Jiang Peng, deputy director of the National Astronomical Observatories (NAOC) and FAST’s chief engineer. “China Sky Eye is steadily realizing the goal of ‘early results, more results, good results,’ and is continuously advancing toward ‘major results.’”

Jiang, writing in Guangming Daily, described how the telescope “keeps pushing our vision deeper into the universe, refreshing humanity’s understanding of the cosmos again and again in frontier fields such as pulsars, fast radio bursts, and the neutral hydrogen universe.”

From a Single Eye to an Array

FAST’s reflector is not a rigid fixed dish. It uses a cable-net structure: 6,670 steel cables form a net suspended from a ring beam held up by 50 giant steel columns. On the net sit 4,450 reflector panels of more than 380 types. Below are 2,225 down-tie cables, each fixed to a ground actuator. By pulling the actuators, the net deforms to form a 300-meter instantaneous parabola within the 500-meter spherical surface.

The feed cabin weighs about 30 tons and is suspended by just six cables — leaving almost no electromagnetic blockage and giving very high antenna efficiency, in contrast to the US Arecibo telescope’s roughly 900-ton platform and ~50 percent efficiency. The design achieved three world firsts in cable-net structure: super-large span, super-high precision, and an actively deformable net.

The team is now advancing the Phase II project. As Zhengguan News, citing CCTV News, reported, FAST will build a surrounding array of dozens of 40-meter-aperture antennas — creating the world’s first hybrid-aperture radio interferometric array centered on a giant telescope. The upgrade is intended to boost resolution to roughly 200 times the current level while retaining FAST’s sensitivity advantage.

The September 2026 Discoveries

FAST’s most recent results illustrate its reach. On September 16, its Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot team captured a compact-orbit double neutron star system, PSR J1856-0039. With an orbital period of only 2.36 hours — the second shortest known — and a total mass of 2.488 solar masses, it is the lightest known double neutron star system, with the companion at about 1.19 solar masses, near the theoretical stability limit.

The system is a natural relativity laboratory. As a detailed scientific summary explained, the measured orbital decay ratio against general relativity’s prediction is 1.009, validating Einstein’s theory. The two stars are expected to merge in about 82 million years, producing heavy elements such as gold and platinum.

Other breakthroughs have followed. A second data release of FAST’s neutral hydrogen survey cataloged 156,000 neutral hydrogen galaxies — five times the previous world record — with density measurement precision of 0.6 percent. Using that map, scientists found that the universe’s declining star formation is caused not by running out of fuel but by reduced efficiency in converting neutral hydrogen into molecular hydrogen. Separately, a team led by Li Di of Tsinghua University used FAST together with the US JVLA to identify 118 neutral hydrogen superbubbles in the Andromeda Galaxy, quantitatively confirming for the first time that continuous supernova explosions sustain galactic turbulence. The work was published online in Nature Astronomy on September 17.

FAST has also detected a nanohertz gravitational wave signal at 4.6-sigma confidence — with just over three years of data, exceeding the 4.0-sigma confidence achieved elsewhere internationally.

Technology That Reaches Beyond Astronomy

FAST’s innovations are spilling over into everyday applications. Pulsar timing supports autonomous spacecraft navigation and improves precision for meteorological and remote-sensing satellites, strengthening typhoon and geological-disaster early warning. Weak-signal extraction technology has improved mobile networks in remote mountainous areas. AI algorithms trained on vast galaxy datasets can assist in reading CT images and identifying landslides. Corrosion-resistant materials and high-precision processes developed for Guizhou’s humid mountains are now used in outdoor surveillance, medical devices, and smart-home sensors.

In application areas, FAST has made important progress in Earth-Moon space target detection, pulsar time standards, and asteroid defense, serving national aerospace security and major strategic needs.

A Legacy Rooted in Perseverance

The telescope exists in large part because of Nan Rendong, the project’s founder and chief scientist, who proposed building China’s own large radio telescope in 1994. Over more than a decade he and his team scouted more than 300 mountain sites before selecting Dawodang, and he spent 22 years driving the project to completion. Nan died on September 15, 2017, and was posthumously awarded the national honorary title “People’s Scientist.” Asteroid 79694 was named “Nan Rendong Star” in 2018, according to a Yangtse Evening Post tribute.

What’s Next

As a single-dish telescope, FAST’s resolution is inherently limited. For dim galaxies and fast radio bursts, it can observe targets but cannot pinpoint their host galaxies — a constraint the Phase II array is designed to address. The team says future observations will further consolidate China’s leading international position in radio astronomy and continue to produce major original scientific results.

Ten years on, FAST’s story is less about a single machine than about a sustained national commitment to fundamental science. Its next chapter — turning one giant dish into a coordinated array — will test whether that commitment can keep pushing the boundary of what humanity can see.